Is the software factory the next big area within platform engineering?
When we started building Drive, our internal developer platform, about 2.5 years ago, we had a clear vision for golden paths and developer experience: a strong local development environment, with testing and linting available as early as possible.
And this was before agents really took off...
Building with agents today is so much about managing the infrastructure around the agents. I'm still quite convinced that the software factory will need to be custom made for a specific product to be effective, but just like with platforms today with golden paths, so will you have golden paths for software factories.
Just look at Gas City (an agent orchestration SDK built on beads) which I think is an excellent project for building agentic SDLC - you need to have some know-how to get any value out of it and to really get leverage it becomes an integral part of the platform. All from how to interact with the software factory to how support agents can monitor and analyze running services.
Lets be honest though. Most of us are not there yet. We need to understand what is built and need to maintain discipline to avoid our codebase being an increasing source of slop. Right now Im mostly on team agentic engineer, focusing on how teams can leverage AI while staying in control over also lower aspects - but were already many experimenting and learning how to build software factories. The path is starting to become clearer.
#gascity #softwarefactory #agentic_sdlc #platform_engineering