Building an Agentic Software Factory

Could your software be fully automated?

That was the question put to the main stage audience at WeAreDevelopers North America by Entire CEO Thomas Dohmke and Factory CEO Matan Grinberg.

While most of us can agree a human-in-the-loop is preferable for a whole raft of reasons (not least security), asking the question encourages us to consider bottlenecks for agents or humans, which aspects of engineering can be easily automated and which ones less-so, and how confident we really are in the guardrails and sandboxes designed to keep the agents in check.

So, with that in mind here are a few things you can do right away to start moving faster and (hopefully) without breaking things.

Find your bottlenecks

See which tasks are slow to be picked up on or completed by humans, or without regularity. Perhaps it’s a simple switch like allowing agents to conduct initial code reviews, rather than a more manual human-first approach.

Finding points in your workflow where progress slows is a great way to find a task that an agent could lend a hand in completing or moving forward.

Pick one job that’s easy to hand off

When we think of automation, we think of repetitive tasks, completed on a scheduling. Look for work that is repetitive, well defined and easy to verify, such as scanning for leaked secrets before a repo goes public, or analysing updates to dependencies to identity potential issues. Automate one simple task, then compare the cost with the time saved.

Ask what happens when it goes wrong

Consider the risks when you’re automating a task. For that job, write down the worst case: a bad merge, an outage, a data leak. Then ask who would notice, how quickly, and how you’d roll it back and take back control if it happened.

Test your guardrails

How confident are you in your sandbox, permissions and branch protection? Give an agent a task it shouldn’t be able to finish, like changing a protected path or reading a secret it shouldn’t have, and see whether it’s stopped in it’s tracks.

Want more? Watch the full talk

See Thomas Dohmke of Entire and Matan Grinberg of Entire in Building the Agentic Software Factory from the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America.