Factory’s Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes Unleash the Droids on Software Development

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 Mentioned: Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Study , string theorist that Matan cold called as an undergrad SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering , small-model open-source software engineering agent SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues? , an evaluation framework for GitHub issues Monte Carlo tree search , a 2006 algorithm for solving decision making in games (and used in AlphaGo)