Archimedes said that with a large enough lever, you can move the world. For decades, software engineering has been that lever. And now, AI is compounding that lever. How will we use AI to apply 100 or 1000x leverage to the greatest lever to move the world?
Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, co-founders of Factory, have chosen to do things differently than many of their peers in this white-hot space. They sell a fleet of “Droids,” purpose-built dev agents which accomplish different tasks in the software development lifecycle (like code review, testing, pull requests or writing code). Rather than training their own foundation model, their approach is to build something useful for engineering orgs today on top of the rapidly improving models, aligning with the developer and evolving with them.
Matan and Eno are optimistic about the effects of autonomy in software development and on building a company in the application layer. Their advice to founders, “The only way you can win is by executing faster and being more obsessed.”
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
(01:36) Personal backgrounds
(10:54) The compound lever
(12:41) What is Factory?
(16:29) Cognitive architectures
(21:13) 800 engineers at OpenAI are working on my margins
(24:00) Jeff Dean doesn't understand your code base
(25:40) Individual dev productivity vs system-wide optimization
(30:04) Results: Factory in action
(32:54) Learnings along the way
(35:36) Fully autonomous Jeff Deans
(37:56) Beacons of the upcoming age
(40:04) How far are we?
(43:02) Competition
(45:32) Lightning round
(49:34) Bonus round: Factory's SWE-bench results