I have been quietly building a software factory for my own work — and I think this is how most engineering will run in a few years.
The framing is having a moment: Factory 2.0 and others are pitching "software factories," and this week's agentic code-review numbers show why it is urgent — one report found time spent in code review up over 440%, and pull requests merged with no review at all up 31%, once agents started generating at volume. More generation without a system around it does not speed a team up. It buries it.
The loop I keep coming back to is concrete: operator sets context → an AI planner turns it into a plan and writes the docs → the plan becomes queued tasks → an AI producer writes the code → it lands in git → AI review and tests → human review → delivery. Then it runs again until the thing is done. Most of that is buildable today. What is missing is not the model — it is the operator layer that moves work between stages without a human copy-pasting between tools.
That layer is the part I have been building. A task system that is AI-facing as much as human-facing. Orchestration that triggers the producer and routes the output. Approval boundaries so the automated path cannot quietly exceed its authority.
The future of engineering is not writing more code. It is owning the line that produces and accepts it, and within controlled and structured boundaries.