Warp wants to make it easier to build your software factory

On Tuesday, Warp introduced Warp Factories, open infrastructure for building cloud software factories, agentic systems that automate work across the software development lifecycle, which have been popping up in different forms from companies like Augment Code and Chainguard.

Warp, an agent development platform, calls Warp Factories “the building blocks” for developers to create their own scalable factories. It’s pitching the infrastructure as the solution for two problems founder and CEO Zach Lloyd says are frequent engineering complaints: 1) measuring and improving coding agent ROI; 2) governance and control.

The aim is to tackle both problems by making sure “the annoying bits [are] taken care of” so developers can focus purely on optimizing factories for specific products.

As Lloyd writes in a blog post, he “predicts software factories will be as ubiquitous as CI/CD in the next few years.” Experts tell The New Stack they see software factories gaining traction, but they’re more cautious about the timeline.

“I think the software factory is inevitable,” Lee Faus, founder and CEO, Atomic Software and former global field CTO, GitLab, tells The New Stack. “But before software factories become as foundational as CI/CD, the industry needs to solve a deeper infrastructure problem.”

Specifically, he calls out the importance of tracing agent work: “We’re spending a lot of time talking about how to build the software factory,” Faus continues. “I think we’re going to spend much more time asking what becomes the system of record for the factory.”

Build the factory without building all the infrastructure

Lloyd acknowledges that many organizations already have engineering teams at work building cloud software factories — but he argues that’s too big to be an inside job.

Warp Factories, thus, emerges as the infrastructure on which developers can build their own factories, providing the core components to speed development without making organizations sacrifice flexibility, programmability, customization, or ownership.

When asked about Lloyd’s take on building infrastructure, Erik Gfesser, long-time engineer, tells The New Stack he agrees it doesn’t make sense for most organizations to tackle it in house.

As Lloyd writes, Warp’s new infrastructure is “built to increase coding agent ROI over time” with evals and benchmarks to measure effectiveness and built-in self-improvement and memory. Developers get queryable metrics on agent throughput, cost, quality, and ROI, visible via the Factory control room, API, and Factory MCP. Scorers evaluate how work items move through the factory with an eye on things like token spend, code quality, and whether or not the work introduced defects.

From there, those scores power self-improvement loops and benchmarks. “Observer” agents score select agent runs and then search for ways to make improvements by adjusting variables like the harness, model, or context before making PRs to improve underlying factory functionality. Benchmarks, meanwhile, let developers score tasks across different models and harness configurations to compare performance.

Governance gets easier, but there’s more to solve

Per Warp, the infrastructure includes features to address governance and control, alongside factory definitions as version-controlled code, definitions for distinct agents, plus skills, MCPs, and permissions.

Looking more broadly, Faus tells The New Stack software factory governance will require more than just controlling how agents operate, though:

“A software factory without a record of change risks becoming a very efficient way to manufacture code that nobody can fully explain.”

“Shared infrastructure can make permissions, model access, tool use, MCP connections, policies, cost, and execution environments easier to manage centrally. That’s valuable,” he says. “But governance isn’t just being able to control what an agent is allowed to do. It is being able to prove what it actually did.”

As software factories help speed up code generation, he says the harder problem becomes understanding the scores of interconnected decisions both humans and agents make across the development cycle.

For example, if one agent triages an issue, another researches it, a third implements it, and still others review and verify it, how can an engineer reconstruct why that change was made six months later? “That record has to remain connected to the change itself,” says Faus. “[Otherwise,] a software factory without a record of change risks becoming a very efficient way to manufacture code that nobody can fully explain.”

Software factories are probably the future, but it will be a slow roll-out

Though Warp’s founder is gung-ho about the rapid rise of software factories, other experts are less certain. Like Faus, Gfesser expects software factory adoption to take time:

“My expectation is that software factory adoption will likely be fragmented across multiple vendors similarly to the early stages of CI/CD.”

“As an early adopter of CI/CD myself, I know that CI/CD didn’t catch on the way it did until quality open source products were made available for widespread usage.”

He points out that while the Warp client is open source, the server, the Warp Drive backend, and OZ (Warp’s agent orchestration layer) are proprietary. Also worth noting: OpenAI is named as the founding sponsor of Warp’s open source repository.

“As such, my expectation is that software factory adoption will likely be fragmented across multiple vendors similarly to the early stages of CI/CD,” he says.

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