The AI Coding Factory

We are joined by Eno Reyes and Matan Grinberg, the co-founders of Factory.ai. They are building droids for autonomous software engineering, handling everything from code generation to incident response for production outages. After raising a $15M Series A from Sequoia, they just released their product in GA! https://factory.ai/ https://x.com/latentspacepod Chapters 00:00:00 Introductions 00:00:35 Meeting at Langchain Hackathon 00:04:02 Building Factory despite early model limitations 00:06:56 What is Factory AI? 00:08:55 Delegation vs Collaboration in AI Development Tools 00:10:06 Naming Origins of 'Factory' and 'Droids' 00:12:17 Defining Droids: Agent vs Workflow 00:14:34 Live Demo 00:17:37 Enterprise Context and Tool Integration in Droids 00:20:26 Prompting, Clarification, and Agent Communication 00:22:28 Project Understanding and Proactive Context Gathering 00:24:10 Why SWE-Bench Is Dead 00:28:47 Model Fine-tuning and Generalization Challenges 00:31:07 Why Factory is Browser-Based, Not IDE-Based 00:33:51 Test-Driven Development and Agent Verification 00:36:17 Retrieval vs Large Context Windows for Cost Efficiency 00:38:02 Enterprise Metrics: Code Churn and ROI 00:40:48 Executing Large Refactors and Migrations with Droids 00:45:25 Model Speed, Parallelism, and Delegation Bottlenecks 00:50:11 Observability Challenges and Semantic Telemetry 00:53:44 Hiring 00:55:19 Factory's design and branding approach 00:58:34 Closing Thoughts and Future of AI-Native Development