Instant Software Factories

Wenxin Jiang, Mikola Lysenko

Coding agents can quickly build prototypes, but a long tail of fixes, optimizations, tests, and releases separates a prototype from a product. A software factory handles this ongoing work through a repeatable process. We ask whether this work needs dedicated orchestration and how such factories should be judged. Given a tested repository and a coding agent, an instant software factory uses only two coordination inputs, a swarm of cron-job agents with standing objectives and a shared communication board, such as GitHub, where agents coordinate through the traces they leave. We developed a bootstrap prompt designed to set up both inputs from one round of human input, with governance as a separable layer. We distilled it from two manually configured industrial factories, observed for 15 and 17 days, and have not yet evaluated it. In the GitHub-coordinated CLI factory, daily merges rose 15x during agent rollout, an observed association. Its agents also filed 95% of new issues and authored 40 of 58 PRs that changed CI workflows, and at least 5.6% of issues marked as fixed were later found to have incorrect fixes. Unlike an agent scored on a fixed benchmark, a factory thus changes its…