No, That's Not a Software Factory — Ryan Cooke, WorkOS
The standard software factory puts an agent in a sandbox, prompts it and merges the PR.
When WorkOS built one, the results were hard to tell apart from engineers running Claude Code on their laptops. Ryan Cooke, an engineer at WorkOS, argues that counting PRs or lines of AI code is the wrong measure. What matters is outcomes: are you actually shipping more to customers? WorkOS's answer is to build its engineering process into the factory itself. TARS, its agent, lives in Slack, Linear and GitHub and uses webhooks to track projects and pick up the next ticket on its own. A PM agent drafts the "Hilltop" product doc and breaks approved work into tickets, which solves the blank-page problem. Horizon, the orchestration layer, sits in front of an internal MCP gateway that connects every tool, including Snowflake. Cooke calls that gateway the single best investment for any team starting a factory. He also covers bug and support triage, why WorkOS is building its own sandboxes and a company-wide memory layer, and how it measures success with defect rates, recovery time and adoption.
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