Sources: posts I reposted on X between September and October 2026: Josh Rosen’s Software Factories for Skeptics (via Matt Stockton), Josh Rosen’s The Software Factory Debate: Build, Buy, Fork or Delegate, Lauren’s (@poteto) 2,500 PRs talk and Matt Pocock’s notes on it, and Tailscale on the Secure Software Factory.
“Software factory” kept showing up in my feed this month. My first reaction was the same as most people’s: that sounds like a lights-out shop where nobody reads the code. After reading the posts I reposted side by side, I think that framing is wrong, and the useful version is much smaller and much closer to what I already do.
This post pulls the threads together. In Background Agents: What 13 Companies Actually Run I looked at the runtime. This one is about the system around it.