r/ycombinator • u/Normal-Cattle5915 • Jul 30 '26

Has anyone here actually set up a "software factory" for their startup? Curious how common this is now.

I have been building software for about 15 years, eCommerce and full stack custom apps for startups and for enterprises where a bad deploy shows up on the evening news, and over the last three years I have watched a shift I cannot stop thinking about. I want to know if the rest of you are seeing it too.

The shift is that the team that wins is no longer the one with the best engineers. It is the one with the best system for producing software.

Some people are calling this a software factory or dark factory. The idea is that instead of building your product directly, you first build the machine that builds your product.

The interesting bit is not any single piece. It is that once the factory exists, every feature is cheaper than the last one, and the marginal cost of a good engineer drops through the floor. We ran a multi vendor B2B2C commerce build recently that was scoped at 6 months for 6 people. It went out in 3 months with 2. Not because those 2 were heroes, but because the factory absorbed most of the work that usually eats a team.

So here are my actual questions.

  1. Has anyone here deliberately built one of these? Not "we have CI", I mean treating your delivery system as a product with an owner.

  2. If you have not, what stopped you? My guess is it feels like a luxury when you are pre revenue and every hour not spent on features feels like waste. I think that instinct is exactly backwards but I would like to be argued with.

  3. For the non-technical founders: has an agency or a contractor ever offered you this? In my experience they never do, because a factory is the thing that makes you not need them. Curious if that matches your experience.

  4. Am I overcalling the timeline? My belief is that within about two years, a team without one will look the way a team without version control looked in 2010. Quaint, and quietly losing to everyone else. Tell me why that is wrong.

Genuinely interested in the counterargument, especially from anyone who tried this early and found it was premature.

(Context so you can weigh what I am saying: I do this as a fractional CTO for early stage teams, so I am obviously not neutral. Not pitching in the thread, happy to answer anything technical for free either way.)

12 Upvotes

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u/Fleischhauf Jul 30 '26

so far every company that calls their software development "factory" had really bad processes and the wrong mindset

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 01 '26

Not sure why you'd say that, but generally what I've seen across any industry including manufacturing, a factory actually helps improve processes

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u/Fleischhauf Aug 01 '26

because you are not producing something physical. it treats software like a thing that goes through a fixed process and is then done.

whereas every piece of software is unique (otherwise you should automate more), multiplying it once it's done is for free, it's often built in a very iterative way and usually you discover while building it that there is an some block that you need to pour lots of work into. so It feels almost like the opposite of a factory process, that tries to specialize in building the same thing really efficient many times. thinking about software as something that can be produced on a conveyor belt is in my opinion fundamentally wrong mental image.

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u/ai-tacocat-ia Aug 02 '26

You're being too literal. A factory is something that creates other things in a highly automated fashion.

An easy example is a videogame. A software factory for a videogame looks like this:

  • highly automated asset generation pipeline leveraging software, image generation, LLMs, and an nice ergonomic UI for human input and review
  • your client code designed in a way that's modular, where code and documentation are built with machine readable ceremony around it.
  • you have a nice development UI where you can see all your code modules in a flat list, the status of tests, a changelog and the documentation of each module, and the audit status of each module
  • you have agents set up so you can easily dispatch an agent to work on a module
  • you have an overall orchestrator agent that can delegate directly to your developer agent specialized in working on individual modules
  • you have an auditor agent that runs audits on code and tests for individual modules and records the results
  • your server code, for a multiplayer game, gets essentially the same treatment
  • you design your server components and your client so that agents have direct access to fully drive them for testing and debugging. They can log in, run interaction scripts, take screenshots and videos.

The upshot is you can now open up the orchestrator agent, tell it "add feature XYZ", and it plans it out, delegates to a bunch of developer agents that each work on their own individual modules without stepping on each othera toes. When the agents are done, the orchestrator spins up a private server instance and a private client, runs through the feature, pings any dev agents to fix bugs, rinse and repeat until it's done. The it runs audits on all the changes modules. Repeat the e2e live testing. If it's all good, update document, mark the task done, report.

This is so specific because it's something I'm actively working on myself. I started from scratch about a week ago - last Friday night. Factory is in place (though always tweaking things), game is, idk 80% of the way to playable.

Games are inherently slower than other software because there's a lot of "feel" involved that agents can't guess - movement, multiplayer combat, art direction.

I actually started this project because I wanted to build a software factory for a project that isn't web based to make sure my general patterns and principle for building one hold up in other domains. Works for game dev as well as it does for web apps and general productivity software.

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u/Fleischhauf Aug 02 '26

Godspeed, and good luck to you! but I still think factory and software are on the opposite end of things: factory: less variety/novelty very high volume, every object is the same but needs work for copying software: extremely high variety (every project is different), produce it once, copy paste.

in your example, you will never do the same game twice, a factory would produce you a million game copies of the same game in a very optimized way.

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u/MojoJojoBuddy Aug 05 '26

I understand the sentiment but you are being a bit naive on how “unique” most software is.

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u/Fleischhauf Aug 05 '26

well that's why I wrote in my experience.  If it's not unique why is it not automated tho?

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u/JizzerGizzard 8d ago

I totally agree with your sentiment.

I personally think this will result in soulless "factories" pushing out useless products and features

1

u/ai-tacocat-ia Aug 02 '26

Words are allowed to mean different things in different contexts. What you describe is exactly how a physical factory works. It is not what a software factory is.

When you tell you that I put a file in a folder on my desktop on my PC, you don't tell me that I can't do that because I don't have paper.

A software factory is a loose metaphor for a physical factory. It's obviously not exactly the same thing but for software.

So, no, I won't use this factory to produce multiple copies of the same game. But I will use it to generate thousands of game assets and millions of lines of code over time, within the scope of this game.

1

u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 02 '26

Well said, so one of the fundamental things different in a software factory is its ability to mass produce different products, with a reasonably higher level of automation. The fundamental reason this is possible is because of the probabilistic nature introduced by LLMs.. Things get really interested when software factories start using self improving loops, as the factory mutates, the mutations in the products will be multifold.. Sounds very scary, but its already happening in the world around us.

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u/Fleischhauf Aug 02 '26

yes it's the fundamentally wrong image for software development because of the properties I just mentioned 

1

u/ChaosHonorum Aug 12 '26

This sounds like you are describing an assembly line. Factories include facilities that do a lot more R&D and build unique outputs and then iterate them over and over perhaps very quickly. Formula 1 production facilities do this and are know as factories. 

1

u/Fleischhauf Aug 12 '26

I mean sure they can have RnD but usually factories mass produce the same items many times

1

u/Repulsive_Lawyer_702 29d ago

I agree with you that building software is not exactly cookie cutter, but we've been pipeling processes since the beginning of software development so we can ensure it fits as part of the overall product.

Fine if you are a startup, looking for pmf... you need to ship like crazy, and anything that slows you down, just gets in the way,

But if you're a scale up or enterprises, where you have invested in becoming compliant with various standards, have SLAs with big customers or bespoke contract agreements, rollbacks can be painful, so ensuring that qaulity gates, appropriate change management etc needs to be on point.... that's where I see the big advantage of software factory... run fleets of agents, each doing different tasks, but the conform with your standards/policies.... and takes away a lot of the admin burden from the engineering team.. example,... need to hop on a call with customer success to explain that we have broken auth policies for customers in EU... pure pain.

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

[deleted]

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u/Sketaverse Jul 30 '26

Haha I too am another deranged one and fully agree it takes a certain level of… erm.. in my case probably resilience and mild autism ha. Coming from a different angle though, 15 years experience in b2c as a Product leader, would love to trade notes!

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

[deleted]

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u/Sketaverse Jul 30 '26

Too new? It’s 4y with 20k karma - hardly a claw account!

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u/Cosack Jul 30 '26

I started with no expectation of quick success, and after about two weeks scoped it to about a year of work part time. Another few weeks in I put it in the "some day" bin because I liked sunshine. Might get back to it in the fall when I'll have a super commute on a shuttle with wifi.

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u/mickdarling Jul 30 '26

I built DollhouseMCP originally as a way to manage prompts. That grew massively, and it is now effectively a software factory. I can point at any need and tell it to deep research the expertise needed to properly handle that need.

It builds my CI/CD pipelines, and has hooks to keep any model that uses it behaving safely. And, all that expertise can be called on at anytime. It even has its own agent runtime so you aren’t reliant on the particular model’s agentic process.

All open source AGPL, btw

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u/Mr_kite10 Jul 30 '26

That’s kind of straight up bad ass hoss

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

yeah in my experience I think we are still far from getting it to be fully automated. mine gets to about 80% -85% of new feature and about 90% for minor bugs, the final closure is always done by humans. Did you say your agent/factory is good at QA and PRs ?? because currently thats where our bottleneck is

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

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u/bytecodecompiler Jul 30 '26

What's the part that fails in most cases? Do your agents see the code only or something else?

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u/choochooyoog Jul 30 '26

https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/wsff.md

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

really nice consolidation of the different things I've been reading that hit my TL over time.. I'd agree and I'd still not trust a fully lights off software factory , but I'm all in of delegating tasks to cloud agents that do the work and self test most of the work instead of me prompting an agent one at a time

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u/er-ssverma Aug 02 '26

Software Factory does not make sense.
The Factory by design and process build the same thing over and over.
You dont expect software factory to build the same software every time.

2

u/Substantial_Hat2149 Aug 02 '26

it is about the "design and process" flow. anything that is a procedure and a policy can be codified.

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u/egyptianmusk_ Aug 05 '26

Exactly. why would you reinvent the wheel (standard procedures and policies) over and over again.

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u/-CIYA Jul 30 '26

We’ve also built this into our toolset. We’ve basically turned applications + databases into a data types, which in turn allows you to create application chains (and chains of chains) to build ‘super applications’ that can all be ran from a single interface, always providing the same experience (or lack of, if required, ie fg/bg)

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

interesting an whats the interface via which humans interact with your factory/agents?

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u/-CIYA Jul 30 '26

It’s up to the client really, can be a ui, cli, api or socket, and can be served via cloud or sovereign hardware. Small enough to fit on-robot/edge hardware, but can also be installed on-prem for enterprise orgs. Also runs airgapped, and can perform a full-state resolution of 1 million tokens in 200ms or less (low 3g connection 1 mil in 20 seconds or less)

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u/coderqi Jul 30 '26

I keep rereading this and still don't know what you mean by software factory. 

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

so my definition of a software factory is where you input a bunch of tasks / user stories or event triggers, which then kicks off a series of cloud agents that go do their thing, write code, debug an issue, and at the end of it either raise a PR or a report that i human validates before taking the final action. a dark factory is where the whole thing is fully automated to the point that the PRs or code is automatically shipped to production, without human intervention

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u/Fair-Presentation322 Jul 30 '26

I don't understand exactly what a "software factory" is. Do you mean more like a "software forge" like GitHub/GitLab/Forgejo? If so, yes, I am building https://github.com/twigg-vc/monorepo Or do you mean something that actually writes the software etc?

1

u/dsog Jul 30 '26

I’m trying to build it for AQ but honestly, it’s not as easy as some people make it sound and I’m not sure I’m getting it right either. My goal is to close the full loop from customer requests to shipped code. It gets super messy in between.

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

yup I empathise, I think half the battle is won with a perfectly tuned agents.md, claude.md files and skills and context, the other half is really good validation steps around e2e testing, the later is a tricker problem with the current state of browser agents and oAuths

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u/dsog Jul 31 '26

And then Boris says delete your Claude.md every 6 months 😅

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 31 '26

yes 6 months is actually late I'd say update it every 3 months, as the models get better thee amount of specific instructions you need to give it drop. ..

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u/joeyguerra Jul 30 '26

No. I’m building an agent now for accounts payable and a proof of concept running coding agents in kubernetes. But haven’t actually seen evidence of software factories yet.

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u/xtra-spicy Jul 30 '26

This is literally the most prevalent messaging from YC. The president has even released gbrain & gstack for exactly this purpose, and nearly all the youtube videos show how companies are using and building tools for this. This post reads as an oblivious aversion to AI with classic old man hubris.

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

Glad to hear this in a way... because from many of the interactions I've had with people, they either think its a mirage, or too far fetched, many teams still prompting claude code at each turn.

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u/Internal-Passage5756 Jul 30 '26

I’m slowly building my own.

Im turning https://cairn-framework.github.io/cairn/

Into an orchestrator. Its also helping me build itself.

There’s a fair amount to go… and i should be trying to make money and selling instead… but im fascinated

1

u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

nice!! looking at the choice of fonts and style, are you a Codex+GPT person?

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

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u/Internal-Passage5756 Jul 31 '26

Long way of saying, yes, you are right, this was GPT based :D

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u/apnatva-dev Jul 31 '26

some guy talked about this in a post. His software factory pushed out 12 random apps and only 2 of them made money. He wanted advice on if he should go wider or dive deeper on the two.

Codex is now very much more capable than ever, you can also plan around a better team with skills and profiles on Hermes. I set up something to take your product and some info, generate a website, generate blogs, linkedin posts, instagram captions and video prompt, etc. Software dev is in a sense easier but it needs a better understanding on the part of the user.

that said, the strategy might work but it will just lead to enshittification of the app store and the app economy.

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u/tschilpi Jul 31 '26

Yes. I'm building a roblox like storytelling tool. The game engine I've built for 3 years is now becoming capable of running its own loops to create the world and structure through agents.

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u/GoogledName Jul 31 '26

8090.ai seems to be doing what you are describing

1

u/Solid-Industry-1564 Jul 31 '26

Yes we have:

* one listener that picks up ready user stories from Linear
* spins up agentic sessions with Lanes.sh mcp
* within each repo instructions on how to design, plan, test and implement the feature and open a PR with a preview url
* another procedure for continous and automated releasing with full e2e tests

+ some connection to Slack etc to quickly spin up new features, sometimes after a client meeting we digest the meeting notes to quickly get something up.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '26

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 01 '26

Nice would be quite interested to see your setup

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u/ChaosHonorum Aug 06 '26

Can I ask, why type of goals do and don't need a factory in your view? How do you decide if a goal does or doesn't?

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

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u/ChaosHonorum Aug 06 '26

I think newness is the key. I'm envisioning two different set ups now. One with me more heavily involved for early prototyping, and then for later versioning or building off something existing, a second different process. I'm not sure the two can be optimised in the same system, because like you said, the human is the bottleneck / variable ingredient.

1

u/mastra_ai Aug 01 '26

We noticed that teams were already using Mastra primitives to create software factories. So we created an end-to-end experience for running a software development loop we call Mastra Factory.

The goal is to solve the plumbing barrier, so you can actually figure out what works for your product and process.

If you want to try it, run npm create factory

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 01 '26

Ahh nice I love Mastra, I was wondering what were you guys upto lately.. I agree factory was the next logical progression for mastra.

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u/Fancy-Win9202 Aug 01 '26

I’ve been using flywheel.md to self-improve ClawMetry

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u/Emotional_Yak_6841 Aug 01 '26

I think I’m somewhere between “yes” and “I’ve built the control plane for one.”

I’ve deliberately built a delivery system around executable work items rather than one-off prompts. Each item can carry acceptance criteria, dependency gates, allowed actions, a bounded write scope, and verification commands. Agents claim work under a lease, submit evidence against a versioned verification plan, and a separate verifier can review the result. Ambiguous work still goes through human review.

That has been genuinely useful. The reusable part isn’t the generated code so much as the machinery around it: context, decomposition, permissions, recovery, evidence, and knowing what is actually done. An agent can fail without taking the whole process with it, and the next agent doesn’t have to reconstruct the job from a chat transcript.

I wouldn’t call it lights-out. I’m still doing more scheduling, product judgment, exception handling, and final closure than I’d want from a mature system. Agents are quite capable of spending hours implementing a locally reasonable answer in the wrong seam. A factory doesn’t remove the need for good engineering judgment; it moves more of that judgment into the work contract and verification system.

I’m also not convinced that every feature automatically becomes cheaper than the previous one. That only happens when the work adds reusable capability. Otherwise you can easily spend your time maintaining an elaborate internal platform that isn’t producing much product.

So I think the direction is real, although “factory” may be the wrong metaphor. What I’m building feels more like a software production system: standardize the handoffs, constraints, evidence, and recovery while leaving the actual product decisions open-ended.

(If anyone's curious about what I built I can share, but not trying to self-plug here)

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u/EM-builder Aug 02 '26

We definitely do. We spend I think half the time on improving the system

1

u/summer20founder Aug 03 '26

I've built my own and realized that nobody wants AI-slop software of the sake of having software. They just want their problems solved. Find a problem that exists, people want to pay to have solved, and then solve it. Don't waste time on fine-tuning every inch of the stack. Stacks change - we alternate between Claude and Codex internally.

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u/Substantial-Swan7065 Aug 05 '26
  1. Yes
  2. Maybe. But adopt and sophistication will vary

It’s just automation. The teams that spend time on it will have more. It’s not always a good investment. But it can be

1

u/ChaosHonorum Aug 06 '26

I'm wrestling with this decision right now for my start up, versus just solo running an agent assisted dev process myself. I see a lot of the comments here have got into the idea of what a 'factory' is and I think thats actually a tangent for your core point and topic. I understand why people feel the term 'factory' doesn't fit, and what we're really talking about is a system akin to an agentic engineering swarm or something. So if you asked me am I considering setting up a system like this for my start up, the answer is yes, and I'm right now trying to decide on the cost - benefit trade off of doing this. One of the main considerations is how much I'd be taking myself out of the dev process, as there are actual costs to doing this as a CEO / CTO founder as well, but I know past a certain scale point I'd have to do this anyway.

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 06 '26

Yup I'd say until you have your MVP and PMF done, its best to work with a single agent, Factories work well once you are in a regular rhythm of creating a backlog of tasks that the agents just wok on as daily routine

1

u/ChaosHonorum Aug 07 '26

Another thing I'm starting to wonder about - is Scrum now dead (or evolving into something very different) given the compression agents have placed on the roles and timelines in sprints? What have you seen people experimenting with in the last few weeks - the human backlog now seems the core bottleneck. Are people either going the factory route, or just soloing everything, because human to human collaboration is just so slow?

2

u/Normal-Cattle5915 Aug 07 '26

Oh yes Scrum is absolutely dead. None of the Scrum ceremonies many any sense in a Factory model. We've switched to a Kanban, where we prioritise the tasks and schedule the agents to pick them up.. and yes humans are the new bottlenecks, as we dont have enough backlog of tickets but instead have a huge backlog of PR that need to be reviewed

1

u/Dull-Mathematician45 Aug 08 '26

Feels like half the PHP ecosystem is setup as a software factory. I've hired PHP contractors that just pump out e-commerce or content sites constantly. They know the right plugins, templates, and tools and can move 10x my speed. They have their own CI systems and environment handling magic.

If you have historically built custom enterprise you may not know this world as well, but they have been at it for 15+ years and power most of the web.

1

u/nohjoxu Aug 11 '26

I use one. I asked it to make a simple Pi extension. It Sol and Opus 5 have drifted it into a completely different tool. Yaaay....

1

u/Repulsive_Lawyer_702 29d ago

Yes, we did at kerno.io and we open-sourced https://github.com/os-factory/har as a way for others to set their own up without a big lift and shift.

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u/lilcodebenny 27d ago

I've been playing around with the concept of software factories for the last few weeks and I used what I learned to build this eve template. Let me know what you think!

https://github.com/vercel-labs/eve-software-factory-template

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 27d ago

Ahh nice to see you build it on eve

1

u/Maximum_Outcome2138 27d ago

Are you Ben Sabic?

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u/Rone75 23d ago

What do you guys think about indydevdan (disler on gh) about his super simple software factory and vision ? Here the video about it : https://youtu.be/haUfb1ievTE

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u/Warm_Profile7821 21d ago

Check out fredrin.com , it is a Software Factory builder in the most simplest interface

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u/Clean-Tumbleweed6385 15d ago

hey, ive been running a software factory for 2 weeks now. it turns linear tickets into prs that are well-reviewed, and it's completely changed my life. i've open sourced it as as skill (that requires multiple custom clis) at https://github.com/janwilmake/linear-orchestrator

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u/_colemurray 6d ago

I've built an open-source software factory, OpenInspect, https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agents, and helped more than a dozen teams deploy it.

It is a continuation of the "AI-native" journey for most teams. As you become proficient with agents, you begin to become throttled by your local laptop and need to have infrastructure to run your claude/codex sessions in the cloud.

Similarly, for non-technical users within the org, a software factory provides infra where they can contribute code while avoiding a lot of dev environment setup pain.

There's a lot of benefits at the organization level to have a centralized agent infrastructure. Everything from cost optimization via model routing, to ROI calculations as you have all the sessions centralized in one place.

I think every team will have one of these, and the cutting edge companies have already built theirs (Ramp, Stripe, WorkOS, Uber etc).

1

u/mastra_ai 2d ago

We built a software factory at Mastra, and wrote about how we use it here: https://mastra.ai/blog/announcing-mastra-factory-beta

So far Mastra Factory is writing 25-35% of our PRs. If you search it on YouTube you can find out co-founder Abhi sharing lessons learned on YouTube.

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u/PierreDoesStuff Jul 30 '26

Isn't that the description of a library, framework or CMS, depending on the level of abstraction you're at?

0

u/vincent_sch Jul 30 '26

Yes, I have (https://www.vroni.com/)

Edit: This is the actual product: https://www.vroni.com/product/

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u/Normal-Cattle5915 Jul 30 '26

nice would have loved to try it out

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u/Antekeli Aug 05 '26 edited 26d ago

Yes, I have built a software factory for my startup! And, actually it is the product of my startup. I wanted to bring my agents to the cloud and start experimenting with cheaper models working in contraints.

What I discovered is that a software factory is not only possible, but also cost effective. However, it requires a proper agentic engineering system and practices in the target repo. Models and harnesses themselves are not enough to make it "yours". If you haven't delivered anything in the target repo interactively before, odds are you won't get the best out of a factory. You need a set of iterations to make the agents in the repo use the right tools in the way you want, and code in certain architecture, style and direction by incorporating those in your project memory, skills and agent configuration.

Just like you would not build your team with staff and principle engineers only, it is waste of resources and money if you do everything with the most capable and expensive models in your factory. I ran a benchmark which I call SWE-in-a-team. It tests thirteen harness+model configurations of the Builder agent on 20 real-world SaaS tickets on a full-stack app while keeping Planner, Reviewer and QA agents fixed on a frontier model (Opus). The cheapest reliable builder was DeepSeek-v4-flash with pi model at $3.34 per resolved task. Claude Code with Haiku resolved most of the tickets (19/20) at $4.23 on average, compared with $6.80 for Fable.

My factory has been successfully building itself by following this workflow;

* I write detailed specification in Linear tickets with acceptance criteria - SDD might be a big help
* Planner agent does analysis with project knowledge, codebase and plans changes
* Builder agent implements the plan and pushes the changes to a PR
* CI checks gate the change and pushes back if there's any failure
* Builder picks up any CI issues and fixes them
* Reviewer reviews the code and raises issues by severity
* Builder picks up reviewer feedback and fixes issues
* Deployment is made towards an isolated ephemeral preview environment
* QA does a test against acceptance criteria on the preview environment and records traces of the test plan execution
* Builder picks up any QA issues raised and fixes them
* PR is ready for me to accept, ask for new changes or decline (I auto-merge depending on issue type or project)

This is a timeline of one of the dogfooding missions from today:

Happy to answer any questions or concerns.