Software Engineering Is Becoming Factory Engineering — Zach Lloyd, Warp
Description
Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp and a former principal engineer who led engineering on Google Docs, is still shipping all the time, but hasn't written a line of code in six months. His thesis: software engineering is turning into factory engineering. Every serious project will run a software factory, the same way every project now has CI/CD. Lloyd explains why Warp open-sourced after five years closed (60,000+ GitHub stars and over 800,000 active developers). When software gets cheap to build and clone, a great product isn't enough. Building in the open builds an ecosystem, and automation now handles the usual pain of noisy issues and sloppy PRs. He tours the factory floor: inputs, triage, product and tech specs, implementation, review, verification and monitoring, plus the architecture and data layer underneath. He also covers skill loops that improve the factory itself. He ends with a starter repo for building your own factory agents, and Q&A on build vs. buy, advice for new grads and why human taste still matters. Speaker info: X/Twitter: @zachlloydtweets (https://x.com/zachlloydtweets) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachlloyd/ Related links: Warp: https://www.warp.dev Warp's public factory: https://build.warp.dev Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:55 About Warp 1:55 Software engineering becomes factory engineering 2:10 From autocomplete to interactive agents to automation 2:50 Show of hands 3:40 The software factory loop 4:50 Why Warp went open source 5:25 build.warp.dev: a public factory 5:35 Software is cheap to build and to clone 6:15 A great product isn't enough 7:05 Build in the open 7:35 Taming open-source pain with automation 8:25 What a factory needs 9:05 Every project will have a factory 9:25 Touring the factory floor 10:25 Triage 10:50 Product specs and tech specs 11:20 Implementation and review 11:55 Verification 12:15 Monitoring 12:30 Build or buy? 13:05 The factory architecture 13:50 Measure and improve 14:20 Skill-improvement loops 15:10 Where
Summary
Generated by gpt-5.6-terraAt-a-Glance
- Verdict: Watch fully
- Core thesis: Software engineering is shifting from individuals writing code with interactive agents to engineers designing, operating, measuring, and continuously improving automated multi-agent software-delivery factories.
- Why it matters: The talk offers a practical control-plane model for agentic SDLC automation—triage, specification, implementation, review, verification, monitoring, and learning loops—directly applicable to AI agent orchestration and engineering operations.
- Best use: Use it to frame an internal agentic development platform roadmap, especially the human-gate design, skills/context layer, data plane, and feedback loops required to make coding agents reliable at scale.
Executive Summary
Zach Lloyd argues that the current phase of developer AI—interactive coding agents such as Claude Code and Warp—will give way to automated, cloud-based software factories. In this model, work enters through product ideas, user requests, monitoring signals, or task systems; agents triage and specify it, implement changes, review and verify them, then observe production outcomes and feed those results back into the next cycle.
The crucial shift is not simply that agents write more code. Engineers become "factory engineers": they design workflows, provide agents with relevant context and skills, decide where humans must intervene, select models and harnesses, and optimize throughput, quality, human review cost, and token cost. Lloyd treats this as an operational and systems-design problem rather than a prompt-engineering exercise.
Warp’s open-source strategy is presented as a live example. It built automation around the burdens of open-source maintenance—noisy issues, weak pull requests, code-review overload, and verification—then exposed the resulting workflow publicly through build.warp.dev. Lloyd also argues that as software becomes cheaper to build and easier to clone, product quality alone is less defensible; startups need distribution, ecosystem, brand, data, capital, or community advantages, and building in the open can help create them.
The talk is strongest as a high-level architecture and operating model, not as a proven benchmark study or detailed implementation manual. Lloyd repeatedly emphasizes that human product judgment remains essential: a highly automated factory that produces work customers do not value is still a failure. His practical recommendation is to build a simple factory first, but generally avoid building a full internal platform unless the infrastructure itself is strategically core; tune or adopt a platform while keeping attention on the company’s product.
Key Takeaways
- Claim: Significant software projects will increasingly run as closed-loop, agent-assisted software factories rather than as primarily interactive human coding workflows. | Evidence: Lloyd describes a recurring SDLC loop: ideas enter; agents triage; complex work receives specs; humans review specs; agents implement; humans and agents review code; agents verify; humans review the product; the team ships, monitors, and feeds observations back into intake. | Implication: Ken should treat agentic development as an orchestration and lifecycle-automation problem, not merely deployment of a coding copilot to each engineer. | Caveat: The predicted pace—roughly the next six to twelve months—is explicitly uncertain, and the model is a forward-looking thesis rather than a measured industry result.
- Claim: A usable factory needs four foundational capabilities: workflow automations, agent context and skills, well-placed human escalation points, and self-improvement loops. | Evidence: Lloyd identifies these as the components of an effective factory and argues that agents should assist both contributors and maintainers, rather than merely execute isolated coding tasks. | Implication: An agent platform should explicitly model skill packages, context retrieval, exceptions/escalations, and post-run learning; a queue of autonomous coding jobs alone is insufficient.
- Claim: Triage and spec generation are the most pragmatic entry points for SDLC automation: automate only easy, unambiguous issues directly, and turn harder work into reviewed product and technical specifications. | Evidence: Warp’s recommended pattern is for a triage agent to send straightforward requests to implementation, while a specification agent produces a product spec defining product invariants and a tech spec defining architecture and code shape for complex work. | Implication: Ken can reduce agent failure and review churn by making a structured product-spec/tech-spec handoff the default boundary between ambiguous demand and autonomous implementation. | Caveat: Specification quality becomes a control point: humans review specs before implementation, particularly when requirements or product trade-offs are nontrivial.
- Claim: Review and verification should be designed as risk-management layers, with agents performing first-pass review but humans retained for selectively high-risk decisions. | Evidence: Lloyd calls review the painful stage because teams are tired of reviewing "agentic slop." He recommends agent code review first, then progressively deciding when human review is warranted; verification can include CI/CD and computer-use testing that generates screenshots or videos of UI behavior. | Implication: Build policy-based review routing tied to change risk, rather than either requiring humans to inspect every agent diff or allowing blanket autonomous merges. | Caveat: The appropriate human-review threshold varies by application type and risk; the talk does not prescribe fixed approval policies.
- Claim: A scalable factory requires a control plane plus a persistent data plane, not just cloud sandboxes running coding agents. | Evidence: Lloyd’s architecture includes multiple work-ingress channels; a control plane that distributes work across the factory; execution infrastructure comprising cloud sandboxes, agent harnesses, and models; and a data plane that lets agents remember actions, learn, and improve over time. | Implication: For an OpenClaw or agent-ops stack, separate orchestration/routing from execution and memory/evaluation data, while making a deliberate build-versus-buy decision for the surrounding platform. | Caveat: He says simple versions are easy to build, but scalable internal infrastructure accumulates substantial complexity; most companies should prioritize their core product rather than fully reinvent the platform.
- Claim: Self-improvement should be operationalized through observer agents that learn from human corrections to agent behavior. | Evidence: Lloyd’s example is a code-review agent whose comments are corrected by a senior engineer; an observer agent should inspect those corrections and improve the code-review skill for later runs. | Implication: Capture reviewer overrides and downstream outcomes as training/evaluation signals, then use controlled promotion rather than leaving agent skills static. | Caveat: This requires retaining structured traces of agent outputs, human edits, outcomes, and relevant context; the talk does not explain the evaluation method or safeguards for automatically changing skills.
- Claim: As code becomes cheaper to generate and software easier to clone, defensibility shifts beyond the product itself, while human product taste remains the essential constraint on automation. | Evidence: Lloyd names distribution, ecosystem, brand, data moats, and capital as advantages beyond a great product, and argues that building in public can create ecosystem and community. He also warns that a factory generating work nobody wants has no value. | Implication: Do not optimize engineering throughput independently of discovery and customer-value signals; use automation to accelerate a product strategy, not substitute for one. | Caveat: Open sourcing was not presented as universally appropriate: Warp built closed for five years before making the move, and its public factory is described as a functioning but imperfect prototype.
Detailed Brief
Warp’s public-factory experiment and open-source rationale
- Claims: Warp open sourced in part to create a public, observable software factory rather than solely to distribute code.; Agentic workflow automation changes the economics of open-source maintenance by absorbing work that otherwise makes maintainership expensive.; Building in public can be a strategic response to lower technical barriers to entry because it helps establish non-code advantages.
- Evidence: Warp reports more than 60,000 GitHub stars, a couple hundred contributors, and more than 800,000 active developers.; Its build.warp.dev site shows issues moving through workflow states and identifies agents and contributors working on them.; The open-source pain points Lloyd names are noisy issues, sloppy pull requests, code-review overload, and the effort required to verify changes.
- Caveats: The speaker characterizes Warp’s system as a "proto factory" that is working but not yet working perfectly.; The apparent success of a public factory may depend on a project already having meaningful user demand and community scale.
- Implications: A transparent operational surface can itself be a community and trust mechanism, not merely an internal dashboard.; For open-source-facing products, automate contributor intake and quality control before expanding contribution channels aggressively.
How engineering roles and talent criteria change
- Claims: Engineers will write less code directly but may ship more product by engineering the system that produces code.; The remaining high-leverage work includes factory tuning: determining whether skills fit the domain and whether the system is producing the right product.; For new engineers, adaptability, critical thinking, learning speed, systems understanding, architectural reasoning, and product orientation remain valuable.
- Evidence: Lloyd says Warp is hiring more people than ever, contrary to the narrative that AI is broadly eliminating hiring demand.; He describes the desired profile as adaptable, product-focused problem solvers who can operate as underlying technology changes.
- Caveats: These hiring observations are specific to Warp’s experience and should not be interpreted as a general labor-market claim.
- Implications: Assess engineering talent not only on code production, but on specification judgment, systems reasoning, operational ownership, and ability to supervise evolving agent workflows.
Notable Concepts & Terms
- Software factory: A closed-loop, agent-driven version of the SDLC that converts incoming ideas and operational signals into monitored product changes.
- Factory engineer / meta engineering: The emerging engineer role focused on designing and optimizing the agent system that builds the product, rather than primarily writing each change manually.
- Product spec and tech spec: Warp’s two-part specification pattern: product specs state desired invariants, while tech specs define architecture and intended code shape.
- Control plane: The orchestration layer that accepts work and determines how tasks are routed across workflow stages, agents, and execution environments.
- Data plane: The persistence and learning layer holding agent memory, traces, feedback, and other information needed for continuous improvement.
- Skill loop: A feedback mechanism in which observer agents inspect how skills perform and use human corrections or failure signals to improve subsequent execution.
- Risk-managed human review: A model in which automated review handles the first pass and human approval is routed according to the risk and type of change.
- build.warp.dev: Warp’s public view of work flowing through its open-source development system, offered as an early example of a visible software factory.
Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care
- Map the current engineering workflow as an explicit state graph from intake through post-release monitoring; identify which transitions are already deterministic enough for agent ownership.
- Pilot a triage-to-spec-to-implementation workflow with a hard split between unambiguous low-risk tasks and tasks requiring a reviewed product spec plus tech spec.
- Create a review-routing policy before increasing autonomous coding volume, including agent-first review, risk scoring, mandatory human gates, and UI verification requirements.
- Instrument agent runs with task context, generated specs, diffs, reviewer changes, verification results, deployment outcomes, human minutes, and token spend so improvement loops have usable evidence.
- Keep agent workflow infrastructure modular: use or buy generic control-plane/execution capabilities unless owning the platform is strategic, while retaining domain-specific skills and routing logic internally.
- Tie factory throughput metrics to customer-value metrics such as adoption, errors, support signals, and retention; prevent optimization toward high-volume low-value output.
- If pursuing open source, evaluate whether a public workflow/status surface could strengthen contributor trust and community while automation handles intake and quality-control load.
Source/Metadata
- Title: Software Engineering Is Becoming Factory Engineering — Zach Lloyd, Warp
- Transcript words: 6801
- Duration seconds: 1236
- Timestamp note: No usable timestamps or chapters were present in the supplied transcript; substantial portions of the talk appear duplicated in the extraction.
Transcript
Zach Lloyd Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here. My name is Zach Lloyd. Today I'm going to be talking about self-improving software factories, the new open source model, and what I think is happening to development. A little bit about me just to begin. So I am a former principal engineer from Google. I used to lead engineering on the Google Docs suite. I've been an engineer now for over 20 years, a long time. I am still shipping frequently, but I haven't written a line of code in the last six months. And I'm the founder of a company called Warp. Warp, if you're not familiar, is an open source agentic development environment. You may know us as a terminal. That is how the company started. We're a terminal that has agents built in. We open sourced it a couple months ago, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that experience and the motivation for it. It's a popular open source project, over 60,000 GitHub stars. We've had a couple hundred people contributing. We have over 800,000 active developers who are using Warp. And increasingly, we are focused not just on the terminal aspect and the interactive aspect of development, but more so on how do you automate development. I'm going to talk mostly about that. So the thesis that I have is that the discipline of software engineering is going to become something more like factory engineering. And I'll explain what I mean by this in a minute, but just keep that in mind. That's what I think is going to happen. If you look at development over the past couple years, it's crazy how it's changed. We've gone from a world of chat and AI autocomplete, cursor, co-pilot, to the phase that we're in now, which I consider to be mostly interactive agents. So you're sitting at your computer and you are telling Cloud Code to do something. You're telling Warp to do something. And I believe what's going to happen over the next six months, a year, hard to predict the pace, is that we're going to move much more towards a world of automation. But before I get into that, just a quick show of hands, how many folks in here are building with agents? 100% makes sense. How many folks are building typically with multiple agents at one time? So again, almost everyone. How many people are running agents in the cloud out of curiosity? So that looks like less than half, but still significant. And how many folks have set up a system internally to automate the whole software development life cycle? So everything from triaging, spec-ing, implementing, reviewing. So I see some hands. So some people are doing this. So this is what's going to happen. Every project of significant size, I believe, is going to have something like this. And it's going to look like this big loop. And everyone is talking about loops. There's nothing that complicated about loops. This loop says the cloud software factory. This loop could literally just say the software development life cycle. It's the same thing. But just to go through this loop, ideas are going to come in at the top. Agents are going to do triage. If something is complicated, they will write a spec. These little blue boxes are where humans step in. Humans will review the spec. Agents will do the implementation. A human and agent will review the code. Agents will verify. Human will review the product. You ship, and then you monitor, and round and round you go. And this is what software development, for better or worse, I think is going to end up looking like. So I repeat the thesis, which is that if this is what software engineering is going to look like, software engineers are going to be the ones who end up building and managing these factories. Now, I promised at the beginning, and I put in the title of the talk that I was going to talk about open source. And so I want to do that for a few minutes. I'm going to take a quick digression. I bring up open source because one of the main reasons that Warp open sourced was to build a public factory. And so this is a picture of this website we've built called build.warp.dev, which shows all of the issues that are flowing through our system, and what state they're in, what agents are working on them, what contributors are working on them. And it's a proto factory done at scale. It's not working perfectly, but it is working. And one of the reasons we open sourced was to try to build this. Just in general, I think it's interesting to talk about open source in the time of agentic development. This is a really stupid graph, but it's that it's becoming much cheaper to build software. A corollary of that is that it's becoming trivial to clone software. And so if you are in the software business, I don't know how many folks in this room are in the software business per se, but it's very hard to build a software business if it's free to build software. It's hard to capture the value, especially if a competitor can clone. And so my big takeaway or a big tip for everyone in here is that the first thing you should do is patent your code. I'm kidding. This is a complete joke. Don't do this. My first tip is obviously you need to have a great product. This has always been the case, but I would say a great product probably was never enough, but even now more than ever, if you think that you're going to build a great software business just by building and shipping a great product, you're probably not going to succeed. You need advantages beyond the product. And so those advantages could look like distribution, ecosystem, it could be that you have a great brand or data moat, you might have capital. But if you're a startup, again I'm coming from the startup world here, you just don't have these advantages. And so you still want to break through. And one of the ways that I suggest doing this is by building in the open. And so to be clear, it took Warp five years of building closed to sort of make the leap into building in the open, and I'll explain why. But if you build in the open, it helps build your ecosystem. It can take you from being hated on Hacker News to tolerated. It can burnish your brand, it creates community, and so there's all these advantages to it. And some of the things that I think have traditionally been a pain can now be managed. And so the traditional pain of open source might be something like you get a lot of noisy issues. You get sloppy PRs, you can end up in code review hell, you can end up having to spend a lot of time verifying changes. And so the solution, it's a long-winded way of getting to this, for open source, or at least for Warp in the case of open source, the thing that made us finally decide to do this was that we built a whole set of automations, really a software factory, around managing the open source project. And so this is what I think the future is going to look like. I'm going to drill into it a bit just to get a little bit more technical for folks who want to try to build something like this for their own projects. So what are the components of an effective software factory? It's really not that complicated to start or at a high level. You need a set of automations, you need a way of providing context and skills, you need a way of bringing humans in at the correct time, so when things get stuck on the factory. And then a really important thing is you need some set of self-improvement capabilities. So think of this as loops. And if you do this right in the open source world, you can get a world where agents are helping contributors contribute, they're helping maintainers maintain. And I want to emphasize there's nothing special about open source here. I think every sizable project can benefit from this approach, and I predict that every company, every open source project will have, at its core, a software factory, the way that CI CD became just, of course you have that. Maybe, I don't know when that happened 10 years ago. Let's tour the factory floor for a second here. So you're not going to look at this. This is too much. The point of this slide is not to have you read the workflow. It's that the factory floor is basically a graph of steps where you are defining how software gets built for my product. And it looks pretty similar for every product. Things come in, they flow through, they get stuck at certain points. And broadly speaking, just to back out a second, so there's the inputs. The inputs are really ideas. The inputs could be coming from your team, they could be coming from your users. The inputs themselves tend to come in through certain channels that you should think about as your task tracker is an obvious one, or Slack, your teams, your communication channels. They could come directly from your terminal or IDE. They could come from your monitoring systems. But there's some set of inputs. here. So you're not going to look at this. This is too much. The point of this slide is not to have you read the workflow. It's that the factory floor is basically a graph of steps where you are defining, okay, how does software get built for my product? And it looks pretty similar for every product. Things come in, they flow through, they get stuck at certain points. And broadly speaking, just to back out a second, so there's the inputs. The inputs are really ideas. The inputs could be coming from your team, they could be coming from your users. The inputs themselves tend to come in through certain channels that you should think about as your task tracker is an obvious one, or Slack, your teams, your communication channels. They could come directly from your terminal or IDE. They could come from your monitoring systems. But there's some set of inputs that bring work into the factory. There's triage. This is a really important step. So, again, I boil it down to something very simple. But you want an agent that is looking at issues as they come in, and just saying, you know, if this is easy and this is unambiguous, just implement it. And this is how you can actually get going with a factory. If an issue is hard, I recommend having an agent that produces specs. Folks in here using spec-driven development, show of hands. People follow this? Okay. You can do this many different ways, but I think it's very effective. The way that we do it at Warp that I recommend is having an agent write what we call a product spec and a tech spec. Product spec describes the product invariance that you're building towards. Tech spec describes the architecture and the shape of the code. Then you have an implementation agent. This is basically a coding agent that runs somewhere in the cloud. It makes a diff. You can use all sorts of coding agents for this. You have review. This is, in many ways, the most painful part. I expect that people are a little bit tired of reviewing agentic slop. I would have an agent do code review first. And then it becomes, over time, a risk management exercise of, when do you bring in humans to do code review? But you want to have a step in here where humans can do it. This is a very important step for certain types of apps. The verification step. So this would be things like computer use. If you're building a sort of UI, having the computer actually use the code that the agent produced in producing videos and screenshots. CICDs still use it, obviously. And then monitoring. So agents don't stop in your factory when code is shipped. They should observe what's been shipped. Is it crashing? Is it being used? And round and round you go, because you take the output of this monitoring step and you feed it back into the top of the factory. Now you could try and build this. And I went to a talk earlier that my friend Adam gave where Uber has built an internal version of this. And it's pretty cool. I would say for most organizations, it really depends where you are, you'll be able to build a simple version of this easily. But to build a thing that actually scales, it's probably you should probably be focusing on your own product, not building this infrastructure, because there's a lot of stuff that you end up wanting. You're not supposed to read this. It's just a lot of stuff. If you do build it, or if you buy it, you'll end up with something that looks like this, which is you're going to have a bunch of ways of getting work into your factory. That's what's at the top here. You're going to have a sort of control plane for figuring out how work gets distributed across your factory floor. You're going to have the actual place where the work happens. And so that's going to be cloud sandboxes. It's going to be figuring out what agent to run. So what's the harness? What's the model? And then finally, I think this is a really important thing. You're going to want to set up some kind of data plane that sits below your factory. And so that's something that lets agents remember what they've done, learn, improve over time. The factory is not just a product. It's also a mindset. And this brings me back to the thesis I had at the beginning. You need to measure and improve. So factory, this is where the, I don't know, you can stretch this metaphor as far as you want, but you should be thinking of efficiency. And so that means how much software did you ship? How much did it cost in terms of human time and token time? And you're going to want to measure this and try to improve it over time. A key part of this is creating loops. So loops are, again, they sound complicated. They're not that complicated. Loops are basically ways of having agents improve by observing what they're doing, where they're failing. And so a common kind of loop that you're going to want to put in your factory is a skill loop. That means you're going to have your factory agents that are running skills. And then you'll have observer agents that are seeing how those skills are being applied, looking for issues and trying to improve the skills. So for instance, if you had a code review agent and it was leaving comments and a senior engineer on your team is going and correcting those comments, you'd want an observer agent that would look at that and basically improve the code review agent for the next run. This is one thought just to leave folks with, where does this leave engineers? I think you're going to have to get into this mindset, and I'm trying very hard to get our team into this mindset, it's not always easy, that you're not just building the product, but you're building the thing that builds the product. And that's different. It's more like process engineering or manufacturing or something like that. And you could think, okay, maybe that's a bummer. Is that a bummer? And it depends. It depends what joy you get out of software engineering. If your joy is in writing the code, I think everyone in here who is a software engineer is going to be writing less code. But if your joy is in shipping product, it's never been a better time. And this is actually where I find my joy. I like building and shipping the thing. So everyone in here is going to code less, but they're going to ship more. And that's going to be a trade-off. But if you approach it like you're a factory engineer, I think you can see that there's still a really cool set of engineering challenges. You can almost think of it as meta engineering. How do you engineer your system of agents to be the best possible engineering? That I think is a very compelling and interesting set of challenges to solve. So that's it. For folks who are interested, if you follow the link on this QR code, I've set up an open source GitHub repo where anyone who wants to try building their own factory agents can do it. This uses Warp's agent platform as part of it. But you honestly don't have to use it. I'm not trying to push into our product. But this should give you a good sense of, okay, if you want to set up an agent that does triage or an agent that does spec writing, how do you actually do that? How do you get from the theory of working with a factory to actually putting it into practice? I don't know if we have the capability to do questions in here. I saved a few minutes for questions if anyone has questions. Otherwise, I will wrap up. Yes? Yes. It's a great question. So I said something that's almost contradictory. I think you should think of it like, everyone's going to deploy some sort of factory. But then the tuning of the factory, the are these the right skills for my domain? Is this factory building my product in the right way? I still think there's a bunch of interesting engineering challenges. And for some places, you can build this. But again, I think you should probably be focusing on building the core product for your company for the most part. But there's a bunch of tuning and figuring out how to make the factory work for your product that matters. That's a great question. Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. So the question in case people couldn't hear was if I was a college student graduating and entering the workforce right now. So I think that the most important skills in this new world are adaptability. I think that's critical thinking. It's the speed at which you can learn. I do think, I don't know if you're a computer science student, but I still think there's a ton of value in understanding the underlying systems and architecture and being able to reason and product in the right way? I still think there's a bunch of interesting engineering challenges. And for some places, you can build this. But again, I think you should probably be focusing on building the core product for your company for the most part. But there's a bunch of tuning and figuring out how to make the factory work for your product that matters. That's a great question. Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. So the question in case people couldn't hear was like, if I was a college student graduating and entering the workforce right now. So I think that the most important skills in this new world are adaptability. I think that critical thinking is key. It's the speed at which you can learn. I do think, I don't know if you're a computer science student, but I still think there's a ton of value in understanding the underlying systems and architecture and being able to reason and understand the code, understand the specs that agents are writing. So I would focus on those skills. We're hiring more people than we've ever hired. There's a lot of misdirection around people not being hired because of AI. That's not the experience we've had so far. And what I'm looking for are really adaptable product focused thinkers who can be great problem solvers, even as the underlying technology changes. Yeah, I think I have time for one more question. Yes? What about the product structure, discovery, ideation, design, things? What about those? Like, so the question was, what about the product taste, how do you actually build something useful? I think that's probably the right framing, and where do the ideas come from? And so I think that the problem with the factory metaphor, even though I'm leaning into it because I think there's something to it, is that it can sound like mechanizing or dehumanizing. And I still think underlying all of this, the only thing that matters is are you building something useful? And if you have a factory that is churning out stuff that no one cares about, what's the point? And I think that human taste, human input, human product sense, humans guiding at those touch points where you can't automate stuff is absolutely essential. And that's what I do. I'm trying to figure out what do customers want? What do people want? What's going to be valuable to them? So I think that's an absolutely key point to it. I think I'm at time. So I have to go. I hope folks enjoyed this chat. I'm really grateful for being invited to speak. So thank you all very much. Thank you. telling Cloud Code to do something. You're telling Warp to do something. And I believe what's going to happen over the next six months, a year, hard to predict the pace, is that we're going to move much more towards a world of automation. But before I get into that, just a quick show of hands, how many folks in here are building with agents? 100% makes sense. How many folks are building typically with multiple agents at one time? So again, almost everyone. How many people are running agents in the cloud out of curiosity? So that looks like less than half, but still significant. And how many folks have set up a system internally to automate the whole software development life cycle? So everything from triaging, spec-ing, implementing, reviewing. So I see some hands. So some people are doing this. So this is what's going to happen. Every project of significant size, I believe, is going to have something like this. And it's going to look kind of like this big loop. And everyone is talking about loops. There's nothing that complicated about loops. This loop says the cloud software factory. This loop could literally just say, like, the software development life cycle. It's the same thing. But just to go through this loop, it's like ideas are going to come in at the top. Agents are going to do triage. If something is complicated, they will write a spec. These little blue boxes are where humans step in. Humans will review the spec. Agents will do the implementation. A human and agent will review the code. Agents will verify. Human will review the product. You ship, and then you monitor, and round and round you go. And this is what software development, for better or worse, I think is going to end up looking like. So I repeat the thesis, which is that if this is what software engineering is going to look like, software engineers are going to be the ones who end up building and managing these factories. Now, I promised at the beginning, and I put in the title of the talk that I was going to talk about open source. And so I want to do that for a few minutes. I'm going to take a quick digression. I bring up open source because one of the main reasons that warp open source was to build a public factory. And so this is a picture of this website we've built called build.warp.dev, which shows all of the issues that are flowing through our system, and what state they're in, what agents are working on them, what contributors are working on them. And it's kind of like a proto factory done at scale. It's not working perfectly, but it is working. And one of the reasons we open source was to try to build this. Just in general, I think it's interesting to talk about open source in the time of agentic development. This is a really stupid graph, but it's like, you get it? It's becoming much cheaper to build software. A corollary of that is that it's becoming trivial to clone software. And so if you are in the software business, I don't know how many folks in this room are in the software business per se, but it's very hard to build a software business if it's free to build software. It's hard to capture the value, especially if a competitor can clone. And so my big takeaway or a big tip for everyone in here is that the first thing you should do is patent your code. I'm kidding. This is a complete joke. Don't do this. My first tip is obviously you need to have a great product. This has always been the case, but I would say a great product probably was never enough, but even now more than ever, if you think that you're going to build a great software business just by building and shipping a great product, you're probably not going to succeed. You need advantages beyond the product. And so those advantages could look like distribution, ecosystem, it could be that you have a great brand or data moat, you might have capital. But if you're a startup, again I'm coming from the startup world here, you just don't have these advantages. And so you still want to break through. And one of the ways that I suggest doing this is by building in the open. And so to be clear, it took Warp five years of building closed to sort of make the leap into building in the open, and I'll explain why. But if you build in the open, it helps build your ecosystem. It can take you from being like hated on Hacker News to like tolerated. It can burnish your brand, it creates community, and so there's all these advantages to it. And some of the things that I think have traditionally been a pain can now be managed. And so like the traditional, you know, pain of open source might be something like you get a lot of noisy issues. You get sloppy PRs, you can end up in code review hell, you can end up having to spend a lot of time verifying changes. And so the solution, it's kind of a long-winded way of getting to this, for open source, or at least for Warp in the case of open source, the thing that made us finally decide to do this was that we built a whole set of automations, really a software factory, around managing the open source project. And so like I said, this is what I think the future is going to look like. I'm going to drill into it a bit just to get a little bit more technical for folks who want to try to build something like this for their own projects. So what are the components of an effective software factory? It's really not that complicated to start or at a high level. You need a set of automations, you need a way of providing context and skills, you need a way of bringing humans in at the correct time, so sort of like when things get stuck on the factory. And then a really important thing is you need some set of self-improvement capabilities. So think of this as loops. And if you do this right in the open source world, you can get a, you know, world where agents are helping contributors contribute, they're helping maintainers maintain. And I want to emphasize there's nothing special about open source here. I think every sizable project can benefit from this approach, and I predict that every company, every open source project will have, at its core, a software factory, kind of like the way that CI CD became just like, oh, of course you have that. Maybe, I don't know when that happened 10 years ago. Let's tour the factory floor for a second here. So you're not going to look at this. This is too much. The point of this slide is not to have you read the workflow. It's that the factory floor is basically a graph of steps where you are defining, like, okay, how does software get built for my product? And it looks pretty similar for every product. Things come in, they flow through, they get stuck at certain points. And, you know, broadly speaking, just to back out a second, so there's the inputs. The inputs are really ideas. The inputs could be coming from your team, they could be coming from your users. The inputs themselves tend to come in through certain channels that you should think about as, like, your task tracker is an obvious one, or Slack, your teams, like your communication channels. They could come directly from, like, your terminal or IDE. They could come from your monitoring systems. But there's some set of inputs that bring work into the factory. There's triage. This is a really important step. So, again, I boil it down to something very simple. But, like, you want an agent that is looking at issues as they come in, and just saying, you know, if this is easy and this is unambiguous, just implement it. And this is how you can actually get going with a factory. If an issue is hard, I recommend having an agent that produces specs. Folks in here using spec-driven development, show of hands. People follow this? Okay. You can do this many different ways, but I think it's very effective. The way that we do it at Warp that I recommend is having an agent write what we call a product spec and a tech spec. Product spec describes the product invariance that you're building towards. Tech spec describes the architecture and the shape of the code. Then you have an implementation agent. This is basically a coding agent that runs somewhere in the cloud. It makes a diff. You can use all sorts of coding agents for this. You have review. This is, in many ways, the most painful part. Like, I expect that people are a little bit tired of reviewing agentic slop. I would have an agent do code review first. And then it becomes, over time, like a risk management exercise of, like, when do you bring in humans to do code review? But you want to have a step in here where humans can do it. This is a very important step for certain types of apps. The verification step. So this would be things like computer use. If you're building a sort of UI, having the computer actually use the code that the agent produced in producing videos and screenshots. CICDs still use it, obviously. And then monitoring. So agents don't stop in your factory when code is shipped. They should observe what's been shipped. Is it crashing? Is it being used? And round and round you go, because you take the output of this monitoring step and you feed it back into the top of the factory. Now you could try and build this. And I went to a talk earlier that my friend Adam gave where Uber has built an internal version of this. And it's pretty cool. I would say for most, you know, most organizations, it really depends where you are, you'll be able to build a simple version of this easily. But to build a thing that actually scales, it's probably like you should probably be focusing on your own product, not building this infrastructure, because there's a lot of stuff that you end up wanting. You're not, again, not supposed to read this. It's just a lot of stuff. If you do build it, or if you buy it, you'll end up with something that looks kind of like this, which is you're going to have a bunch of ways of getting work into your factory. That's what's at the top here. You're going to have a sort of control plane for figuring out how work gets distributed across your factory floor. You're going to have the actual place where the work happens. And so that's going to be cloud sandboxes. It's going to be figuring out what agent to run. So what's the harness? What's the model? And then finally, I think this is a really important thing. You're going to want to set up some kind of data plane that sits below your factory. And so that's something that lets agents remember what they've done, learn, improve over time. The factory is not just like a product. It's also a mindset. And this brings me back to the thesis I had at the beginning. You need to measure and improve. So factory, this is where the, I don't know, you can stretch this metaphor as far as you want, but like, you should be thinking of efficiency. And so that means like, how much software did you ship? How much did it cost in terms of human time and token time? And you're going to want to measure this and try to improve it over time. A key part of this is creating loops. So, loops are, again, they sound complicated. They're not that complicated. Loops are basically ways of having agents improve by like observing what they're doing, where they're failing. And so a common kind of loop that you're going to want to put in your factory is like a skill loop. That means you're going to have your factory agents that are running skills. And then you'll have observer agents that are seeing how those skills are being applied, looking for issues and trying to improve the skills. So for instance, if you had a code review agent and it was leaving comments and a senior engineer on your team is going and correcting those comments, you'd want an observer agent that would look at that and basically improve the code review agent for the next run. This is one thought just to leave folks with, like, where does this leave engineers? I think you're going to have to get into this mindset, mindset, and I'm trying very hard to get our team into this mindset, it's not always easy, that you're not just building the product, but you're building the thing that builds the product. And that's like, it's just different. It's more like process engineering or manufacturing or something like that. And you could think like, okay, maybe that's a bummer. Like, is that a bummer? Is that, you know, and it depends. Like, it depends what joy you get out of software engineering. If your joy is in writing the code, I think everyone in here who is a software engineer is going to be writing less code. But if your joy is in shipping product, like, it's never been a better time. And this is actually where I find my joy. It's like I like building and shipping the thing. So everyone in here is going to code less, but they're going to ship more. And that's going to be a trade-off. And that's going to be a trade-off. But if you approach it like you're a factory engineer, I think you can see like that there's still a really cool set of engineering challenges. You can almost think of it as like meta engineering. Like, how do you engineer your system of agents to be the best possible of engineering? That I think is a very compelling and interesting set of challenges to solve. So that's it. For folks who are interested, this, if you follow the link on this QR code, I've set up a open source GitHub repo where anyone who wants to try building their own factory agents can do it. This uses Warp's agent platform as part of it. But you honestly, you don't have to use it. I'm not trying to like push into our product. But this should give you a good sense of like, okay, if you want to set up an agent that does triage or an agent that does spec writing, how do you actually do that? How do you get from like the theory of working with a factory to actually putting it into practice? I don't know if we have the capability to do questions in here. I saved a few minutes for questions if anyone has questions. Otherwise, I will wrap up. Yes? Yes. It's a great question. So I said something that's almost contradictory. I think you should, the way you should think of it is like, everyone's going to deploy some sort of factory. But then the tuning of the factory, the like, are these the right skills for my domain? Is this factory building my product in the right way? I still think there's a bunch of interesting engineering challenges. And for some places, you can build this. But again, I think, I think that the you should probably be focusing on building the core product for your company for the most part. But there's a bunch of like, tuning and like, figuring out how to make the factory work for your product that matters. That's a great question. Yes? Yes. Yes. Yes. So the question in case people couldn't hear was like, if I was a college student graduating and entering the workforce right now. So I think that the most important skills in this new world are adaptability. I think that that's critical thinking. It's like the speed at which you can learn. I do think, I don't know if you're a computer science student, but I still think there's a ton of value in understanding like, the underlying systems and architecture and being able to reason and understand the code, understand the specs that agents are written, sorry, are writing. So I would focus on those skills. And like, I don't know, we're hiring more people than we've ever hired. There's a lot of kind of like, misdirection around like, you know, people not being hired because of AI. That's not the experience we've had so far. And what I'm looking for are like, really adaptable product focused thinkers who can like, basically be great problem solvers, even as the underlying technology changes. Yeah, I think I have time for one more question. Yes? What about the product structure, discovery, ideation, design, things, and things? What about those? What about those? Like, so the question was, what about the product taste in like, the, how do you actually build something useful? I think is probably the right, like maybe the framing and like, where do the ideas come from? And so I think that the problem with the factory metaphor, even though I'm like leaning into it because I think that's like, that there's something to it, is that it can kind of sound like mechanizing or dehumanizing. And I still think underlying all of this, the only thing that matters is like, are you building something useful? And if you have like, a factory that is like, churning out shit that no one cares about, it's like, what's the point? And I think that human taste, human input, human product sense, humans like guiding at those touch points where you can't automate stuff is absolutely like essential. And like, that's like what I do. Like, I'm trying to figure out what do customers want? What do people want? What's going to be valuable to them? So I think that's an absolutely key point to it. I think I'm at time. So I have to go. I hope folks enjoyed this chat. I'm really grateful for being invited to speak. So thank you all very much. Thank you.