Building an AI Software Factory with a Human in the Loop
Software factories are not a 2024 idea. People have been trying to build them since 1968, and why those attempts failed is more useful than why we think this one will work.
Sid Probstein, founder of conjure.work, has been running an agentic software factory in production: fleets of AI agents that design, build and test real software, directed by senior engineers, with a person accountable at three fixed points.
This is a working session on what actually holds it together, and it is not the agents.
We will cover:
Why the old discipline still works and is harder to apply. Work breakdown structures, RACI, retrospectives: none of it stopped being true because the workers became agents.
Why narrowing what an agent is responsible for buys more reliability than making it smarter.
Why speed without proof is not leverage, and what that demands of CI/CD.
Where the human has to stand. Toyota gave every worker on the line a cord that stops it, and the line got faster. That remains the best answer anyone has found.
What a feedback loop looks like when your users' own words decide what gets built next.
Where this goes next, including the research question nobody has answered: how little human oversight is enough, and where in the pipeline it has to sit.
45 minutes: 30 minutes of talk, 15 of questions. Free. Virtual.