This AI Agent Builds Better Code Than Most Developers (Factory AI)
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What are autonomous coding agents and how do they work?
These aren't humans, they're a different type of tool that humans can use. We have customers that have quite literally run sessions that go well under the 80 million tokens. Two or three years ago, the term agents had really negative connotations because the only agents that were really out there were extremely unreliable. No one had seen this sort of fully autonomous interaction form factor yet. It's a fully self-contained, binary that runs on any operating system on any device in any environment with any interface that you can imagine.
Welcome, humans, to the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, here with our purveyor of words and slinger of cat puns, Grant Harvey. How are you, Grant?
Doing well. Doing well. How are you, Corey?
I'm doing good, man.
Doing good. I'm excited because today we are digging into the rise of autonomous software agents. Factory AI is one of the fastest growing companies in this space, building droids that can take tickets, modify real code bases, and work inside existing dev workflows. But before we get started, Please take a quick moment to like and subscribe so you don't miss out on videos just like this one.
And joining us today is Factory AI co-founder and CTO Eno Reyes to talk about how this works, what breaks, and what it's like to scale a company at this speed even. Eno, welcome to The Neuron. How are you?
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here and excited to chat more about the droids. The droids. The droids. Were you inspired by Star Wars with the name droids? My lawyers say that that is not something that I can comment on. Just kidding. No. Actually, the name's origin comes from the fact that two or three years ago, The term agent had really negative connotations because the only agents that were really out there were extremely unreliable. They would break at every corner. And when we wanted to sell to enterprises, if they heard the word agent, they would associate it with basically like a research experiment. So we came up with a name that we felt would... also prevents people from thinking this is like a human that's going to replace us.
Like a lot of people name their AI tools with a human name. And we said, look, these aren't humans. They're a different type of tool that humans can use.
What problem with agentic coding were you trying to solve when starting Factory? Like what felt broken about how software teams worked at the time that you started it?
When we started Factory, my co-founder was doing his PhD at Berkeley. And I was at a company called Hugging Face that worked on LLMs and open source tooling for the related... And actually, when I was there, it was pre-LLM. So there were BERT transformer models and tons of different variants of that, diffusion models, all this other stuff. And one thing that was pretty consistent was for the... organizations that wanted code models. All of them were looking to fine tune a model for their code base and maybe get autocomplete. When we talked around to a bunch of companies, we saw that everyone was very fixated on coding. which obviously is extremely important. But the biggest bottleneck oftentimes in most software organizations is not can you write the lines of code to solve the problem, but it is the entire end-to-end process and the bottlenecks and the blockers that occur along the way, right?
Gathering context, understanding decisions, planning changes, stitching all this together. And once you get the code, you know, that's almost like the easiest part of the process. So we wanted to make sure that AI systems that we built for software development could help people with that entire end to end process, which required us to basically do research on agentic systems that didn't exist at that point in time, and figure out what can we do to make them general and very capable across these different tasks.
So was the idea like immediately that were going to do fully autonomous agents or was it, were there stepping stones along the way you were hoping for? Uh, how did that vision kind of evolve if it did along the way?
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