Software development is converging in a way never before seen and Jaymin West gives us some of his observations from the bleeding edge.

AI quickly changed how software that used to take a whole team of software developers into something that could be autonomously generated with a single person using agents. This however, is just the first part.

What’s likely next is what some are calling software factories. Almost all major cutting edge developers such as Anthropic, Cognition, Cursor, Factory, Google, Github, OpenAI, and Ramp all seem to be working towards a factory system that continuously delivers and updates software.

Dark factories that run completely autonomously have been proposed, but experience shows things are not there just yet. West makes some observations from actual working systems people are trying and describes what people are doing – and gives a demo of his own factory.

This emerging software factory system , as supported by the foundation models, is made up of six components:

1. Queue: Work arrives as an issue, not a prompt
2. Control plane: A system that organizes all this information coming in and monitor the system in realtime.
3. Sandbox: One per task. Destroyed after.
4. Pull request: The output unit. Retrieved by a human. This is where dark factories fail – they’re simply not proving to work at scale with mission critical systems.
5. Event stream: Watch every action. Kill it without destroying the run.
6. Durable memory: The sandbox dies every run. Results not written to a file does not survive – so key run data must be stored as results that can be used.