Overlooked Components of the Software Factory

(Or: What we learned turning agent work into a unsupervised software factory)

Primitives to create your own self-driving software factory

fp: local-first issue tracking for humans and coding agents.
drift: Bind docs to code and check for drift.
switchyard: a light software factory for Effect.ts monorepos
rv: evidence review tool (coming soon!)

Links:

Fiberplane issue board showing Switchboard work moving through todo, in-progress, and done

Everyone Is Talking About Software Factories

OpenAI: "An open-source spec for Codex orchestration: Symphony."
StrongDM AI: "Software Factories And The Agentic Moment."
Simon Willison: "How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code."
exe.dev: "Everyone is building a software factory."

"A Dark Software Factory is an autonomous software production loop where agents turn intent into shipped code, validated by scenarios, and evidence, instead of human line-by-line review."

OpenAI's Symphony

OpenAI Symphony before-and-after matrix showing more work delegated to agents across ambiguity and complexity

What We'll Cover

Issue Tracker (fp)
Orchestrator (Codex)
Workers (Codex in Daytona Sandboxes)

What We Won't Cover

Planning
Review / Verification
Factory Observability

What’s overlooked about them?

How they connect to each other
- How the orchestrator picks up and dispatches work to implementer
- How code gets pulled in/out of sandboxes
  - Pulled down from GitHub?
  - Local worktree scp’d or mounted?
- How work on dependent tasks gets merged together
Responsibilities of orchestrator versus the implementer
- Who updates tickets?
- Who files new tickets? (If out of scope bug found)
The interface
- Issue tracker?
- Slack?

A Factory Is A State Contract

A software factory is not mainly an agent launcher. It is a consistency contract between four layers:

Layer	Question
Tracker	what work is eligible?
Orchestrator	what work is picked up?
Worker	what is happening now?
Human	what can a human trust?

Correct means these layers agree. Safe means disagreements are visible before they become silent wrong behavior.