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Software Factories & Harness Engineering

What it takes to run a change through a pipeline of narrow agents and still be able to sign your name under the result, and the numbers behind the claims.

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August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Hand-offs through artifacts See why agents in a pipeline never call each other, what the orchestrator is actually for, and which system holds the state when a run dies halfway. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Deterministic steps and AI steps See which parts of an automated run belong in a script, which genuinely need judgement, and why an instruction file can only ask where a hook can refuse. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Ephemeral environments and seed data See why a git clone is not a runnable system, why every agent run needs a throwaway database of its own, and why the seed data must be synthetic. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE From vague request to ready ticket See why the arrow that sends a request back is the one that decides whether a factory works, what a context pack holds, and what must never be rewritten. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Golden sets: testing the factory See why a change to shared agent instructions needs a regression gate, what belongs in the replay set, and why a per-attempt success rate flatters a pipeline. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Incidents back into the backlog See how fingerprinting turns ten thousand production errors into one prioritised defect, and why the polling cursor and the release decide whether it works. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Measuring a factory honestly See why a baseline collected before you start is the only thing that makes a target testable, and which of your metrics improve fastest by being gamed. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Orchestrator, or just a pipeline? See why a first agent workflow runs fine on the build system you already have, and the specific signals that say a durable engine has earned its place. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Prompt injection in a pipeline See why hidden instructions in a ticket or a log line are an architecture problem, how removing one capability per agent closes it, and what is left over. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Scoped credentials and the kill switch See why a permission matrix belongs to the workflow, not the system, why the interesting cells are the empty ones, and why one off switch is not a kill switch. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE The builder, and its repair loop See why the agent that writes the code is the least interesting one in a factory, what its repair loop must be capped at, and what it may never touch. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE The harness See what the shared instruction files actually do, why they need a precedence order, and why the harness regresses far more often than the model does. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE The human merge gate See why a person approving every merge is a design property rather than a trust issue, how attention scales with risk, and how the gate really fails. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE The PR review agent See why the unit of review is not the commits an author pushed, what the build already owns, and why letting the reviewer push fixes costs you its independence. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Verifying after the deploy See why a green build is not evidence a change works, how to wait for the deployed revision instead of the clock, and where post-deploy checks turn dangerous. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE What a merged change costs See why the price per token predicts almost nothing about an agent bill, what actually drives it, and which levers cut it — in order of how much they save. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE What a software factory is See why a pipeline of coding agents is two loops rather than a conveyor belt, what the return arrow does, and which published numbers do not transfer. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE When an agent stops and asks See what an agent must record when it blocks, who the question should go to, and why the resume path — not the question — is the half teams forget to build. Read it →
August 28, 2026 DEEP DIVE Who owns the factory See which jobs a software factory quietly creates, why each one needs a named person rather than a team, and which unclaimed roles fail first in an incident. Read it →