Agent Zoo · September 4, 2026
A farm of desks
A production line takes work in one end and pushes finished software out the other, and plenty of these systems are built exactly that way. Ours is more like a small office: a handful of specialists, each with a desk, a job, and a memory of what they were doing yesterday.
A software factory is an assembly line whose product is merged code. A ticket goes in. Agents plan, implement, test, and open a review. A human or a policy merges. It's a real, useful picture — vendors use the phrase as a product name, and commentators use it for just about any multi-agent coding setup.
Chatticus is a farm of desks. Copy, books, research, ops. Each desk is a named teammate with memory and a beat, and the desks share one Linux computer. Factories optimize a delivery pipeline. Farms optimize a roster of ongoing work.
"Who sits at which desk" is now a real question about software, which is a strange sentence to be able to say out loud. Not a metaphor for a config file — an actual roster of named workers, each with its own memory and its own beat, all reaching for the same machine.
Enterprise digital labor sells a workforce you hire. Always-on companions sell availability in a sidebar. Both sit next to this category, and both leave something out. A companion can remember you and still have nowhere to put a long-running job. A factory can ship software and still have no bookkeeper.
We don't need to own the word factory. We need to be able to say: we're building a workplace, and a software factory is one kind of work that workplace can take on. When Factory, Grok Bot, Gas Town, or the next coinage ships something that changes how a farm runs, it belongs in a dated post on this desk.
If you only remember one distinction from these first notes: a farm is who sits where, a factory is how code gets merged. Chatticus is the farm.