agent UI distribution protocol
Factory runs software projects for 16 days autonomously via serial agents and validation contracts AI EngineerTL;DW
- Factory's 'missions' system runs multi-agent teams serially on features with targeted parallelization, achieving 16-day autonomous runs without human intervention.
- Validation contracts defined during planning—not after coding—establish correctness independently of implementation, preventing drift in long-running agent systems.
- Missions combine five multi-agent patterns: delegation, creator-verifier, broadcast, negotiation, and structured handoffs across orchestrator, worker, and validator roles.
- Three-role architecture: orchestrator plans with validation contracts, workers implement features with clean context, validators verify both code quality and end-to-end behavior through computer use.
- Serial feature execution with read-only parallelization prevents agent conflicts and duplicated work, reducing errors dramatically despite appearing slower on paper.
- Validation includes dedicated code review agents and QA agents that interact with running applications—neither has seen the code, ensuring adversarial validation by design.
- Right model selection per role ('droid whispering') matters: planning needs reasoning, implementation needs fluency, validation needs instruction-following—no single model excels at all three.
- Structured handoffs between agents document what was completed, attempted, left undone, exit codes, and issues discovered, enabling self-healing at milestone boundaries.
- Slack clone example shows 60% time/tokens on implementation, tests comprise 50% of final code, 90% coverage, validation fails first attempt then creates follow-up features.
- Prompt-based orchestration logic (700 lines) instead of hard-coded state machines ensures missions improve with each new model release rather than becoming obsolete.
TL;DW
- Factory's 'missions' system runs multi-agent teams serially on features with targeted parallelization, achieving 16-day autonomous runs without human intervention.
- Validation contracts defined during planning—not after coding—establish correctness independently of implementation, preventing drift in long-running agent systems.
- Missions combine five multi-agent patterns: delegation, creator-verifier, broadcast, negotiation, and structured handoffs across orchestrator, worker, and validator roles.
- Three-role architecture: orchestrator plans with validation contracts, workers implement features with clean context, validators verify both code quality and end-to-end behavior through computer use.
- Serial feature execution with read-only parallelization prevents agent conflicts and duplicated work, reducing errors dramatically despite appearing slower on paper.
- Validation includes dedicated code review agents and QA agents that interact with running applications—neither has seen the code, ensuring adversarial validation by design.
- Right model selection per role ('droid whispering') matters: planning needs reasoning, implementation needs fluency, validation needs instruction-following—no single model excels at all three.
- Structured handoffs between agents document what was completed, attempted, left undone, exit codes, and issues discovered, enabling self-healing at milestone boundaries.
- Slack clone example shows 60% time/tokens on implementation, tests comprise 50% of final code, 90% coverage, validation fails first attempt then creates follow-up features.
- Prompt-based orchestration logic (700 lines) instead of hard-coded state machines ensures missions improve with each new model release rather than becoming obsolete.
Factory's Missions system chains planner, worker, and validator agents serially—avoiding conflicts from parallelization—with a correctness contract defined before coding begins. Workers inherit clean state from predecessors; validators span linting, type-checking, and live user-testing. Longest production run: 16 days.