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Software Factories

A software factory is the delivery system that takes a team's intent to released software it can trust, while humans build and tune the system instead of writing the product. Building one is harness engineering: the environment, orchestration, isolation and gates around the agents decide what ships.

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Software Factories 5

Our position. We think every company will build its own software factory, encoding its architecture decisions, quality standards and delivery patterns into skills that agents run, orchestrated rather than prompted (The software factory thesis (opens in a new tab)). The factory is a capability you build, not a product you buy, and it is never done: when a new model drops, you rebuild parts of it.

A factory sits one level above building a single agent, covered in Agentic Engineering, and above coordinating a few of them. What separates it from a workshop of agents is deterministic code between the agent steps.

What do you need to build one?

  • Software Factories & Harness Engineering — the factory and dark-factory model, the six harness components, and the ticket-to-PR pipeline.
  • Multi-Agent & Orchestration — when multiple agents pay off, coordination topologies, isolating and merging parallel work, and keeping loops halting.
  • Security & Runtime Isolation — the untrusted-generator threat model, sandboxes, and blast-radius control below the layer the agent reasons in.
  • Dark Factory Patterns — nine patterns and four anti-patterns of a factory that runs without a human approving each step, each with context, problem, solution and consequences.
  • The Federated Factory at Enterprise Scale — what changes when you run more than one factory: the three-tier split between platform, domain, and team, and MCP as the seam.
  • Production evidence: what running factories report, and where they broke down.
  • Evidence: the productivity studies the factory thesis has to hold up against.
  • Agentic Engineering: the single-agent practice every factory station builds on.
  • Build or Buy Framework: how to decide what to build yourself when a factory cannot be bought.
  • Tools: the tools these factories are built from.

Resources

Posts

In this section

  • Dark Factory Patterns

    A practitioner's account of running agents without step-by-step approval: the anti-patterns, the patterns that work, its tools and how far to trust the claims.

  • The Federated Factory at Enterprise Scale

    A federated factory platform serves many software factories in one enterprise by splitting ownership into three tiers: a central platform tier for blueprints, tool routing, identity and audit, a domain tier for context shared across teams, and a team tier where agents run. It avoids both one factory for everyone and one factory per team.

  • Multi-Agent and Orchestration

    Multi-agent orchestration is the design of the system that dispatches, isolates, verifies and merges the work of many coding agents. Designed well, parallel agents multiply output. Designed badly, they multiply rework.

  • Security and Runtime Isolation

    Securing an agentic software factory means bounding what agent-produced work can do to the system that runs it. Agents route around prompts and permissions, so the controls that hold are below the agent: isolated runtimes, enforced data boundaries, least authority and risk-based approvals.

  • Software Factories and Harness Engineering

    The hub for software factories: why the harness matters more than the model, factory models from ticket-to-PR to dark factory, and a resource catalog.