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Is it too soon to built software factories?

4 points by Bnowako ↗ HN
I keep hearing about “software factories” / background coding agents that can autonomously work on production repos. It seems like the capabilities are there, but not sure if we have the right tools yet.

There are already some companies providing software for this like ona/factory/codex/claude/cursor

Open-source alternatives - https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agents

Big companies like stripe/ramp/uber/spotify built their own background-agents infrastructure

But nothing seems to be mature enough to just work fine. Is it too soon?

3 comments

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adamzwasserman
No it is not too soon, but it is contingent upon understanding how factories actually work, and what distinguishes industrial production from artisanal production. Even AI generated code is artisanal.

As afar as I know, my book "The Chaos Factory" is the only book that does this.

jeremyroberts0
As you say big companies are building these so there's clearly a market need not being met. Cursor, Claude, and other have started getting into it with background agents but they still drive like the local agent just wrapped into the cloud, they still need prodding to get work done. I've been building Gibon (https://gibon.ai) for exactly this to try and hit this market need. We're running a pilot program right now, check out the site and fill out the form if you're interested and we'll be in touch.