How Warp ships 2,000 PRs a month with AI factories | Zach Lloyd (CEO, Warp)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Can I give you a hard time that humans really are the bottleneck? Because if you look at kickoff to PR time, it's 35 minutes. But if you look at PR to first human review, it's three and a half hours. And when you're doing, I think it was like over 2,000 PRs in the last month. Like how do you keep things in the team from going, as I say, like chaos reigns?
What is a software factory? It's for us at least, it's an actual noun. It's like a product concept where it consists of a bunch of repos, a bunch of like MCP servers, like a bunch of configuration, and then a bunch of agents essentially. So like a code review agent design, different agents, different automations, and it's all defined in code. Scoring happens across all runs, but then there's a second loop, popular. thing on Twitter right now called self-improvement where you have like an observer agent and it can then create updates to your factory that will try to prevent the particular failure mode. One of the things that's most helpful is like you can have these factory agents do computer use verification.
So in this case it made a video. I'm just like talking to this thing that is doing this job that I've done for the last 20 years and it's now it's Like doing it kinda better than me. Spoiler alert, the humans are the problem. Mm.
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI Obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp, and he's gonna show us exactly what he means by the software factory.
What is a software factory and how does Warp define it?
He's gonna show us how you can kick off tasks in Slack, what it means to go beyond the software development lifecycle, and how a technical CEO uses non technical tools. With AI. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by DX. In a recent study across more than 500 engineering organizations, DX found that spend on AI tools has grown 28x over the last year. The share of AI authored code is climbing, but overall innovation has remained flat. As teams generate code faster, new friction in code review and validation is offsetting those. Early velocity gains. DX tracks speed, quality, and cost together across the software development lifecycle, giving engineering leaders clear visibility into how AI impacts delivery and whether those investments are translating into real value.
Download the full report at getdx.com/slash how I. That's GETDX.com. com slash how I AI Zach, thanks for joining How I AI.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
There are a lot of trends on the timeline right now, but one that I think is going to be big for twenty twenty six or seems to be big for twenty twenty-six is The factory. The factory, this like fantastical idea that we have that we're gonna, you know, input tokens and output enterprise value, something like that. At least we'll output code. So I you know, I'm excited for you to show us as CEO, as engineer, as builder. You know, what what to you is the factory and how it looks inside Warp?
The factory is definitely trending. I actually don't love the term factory, but it is the sort of thing everyone is standardized on. It feels a little bit sort of like dehumanizing to me, but um
How does Warp automatically trigger factory workflows from Slack?
But yeah, the the idea is exactly what you said. It's like how do you in a world where we have these sort of magical agents kind of harness their power in a more organized way to have them Um Yeah, basically build build software for you from your ideas. And so yeah, excited excited to to to show you how I how I use factories and like what it means to me.
I was at Lenny Summit recently and I think Marty Kagan also said he hated the word factory. I wonder if it's more like Santa's workshop, right? Like We have magical elves that craft wonderful things that spark joy um and are delivered uh gift wrapped for us. So I'm gonna say the AI, the AI magical, magical workshop. No, show us, you know, what does what does this look like for you? Yeah, you did you just say, you know, you put in your ideas, you output product. Is that real? How how does that really work?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:32
2
What is a software factory and how does Warp define it?
1:32–3:24
3
How does Warp automatically trigger factory workflows from Slack?
3:24–5:13
4
What does the engineering‑leader dashboard show and why does Zach wish he had it?
5:13–7:26
5
How is code review changing inside an AI‑powered factory?
7:26–9:21
6
How does Warp track cost per PR across different model configurations?
9:21–11:38
7
What is the “LLM‑as‑a‑judge” scoring system and how does it catch redundant tests?
11:38–13:51
8
How does the factory self‑improve from failed runs using observer agents?
13:51–46:49
Speakers
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