# Software factory

> The idea of an assembly line for code — spec, branch, review, merge — as distinct from a general agent workplace.

Canonical: https://chattic.us/wiki/software-factory/

A **software factory** is an assembly line whose product is merged code. The happy path looks like: a ticket or spec goes in; agents plan, implement, test, and open a review; a human (or a policy) merges.

That's a real, useful picture. It isn't the same picture as an [agent workplace](/wiki/agent-workplace). A workplace can *contain* a factory. A factory doesn't automatically give you a household computer, a bookkeeper, or a farm of non-coding desks.

## Why the words get borrowed

"Factory" is the strongest industrial metaphor in circulation for agents that ship software. Vendors use it as a product name. Commentators use it for any multi-agent coding setup. The result is that "software factory" now names both an **idea** (this page) and several **products** (covered in our internal landscape notes).

Chatticus doesn't need to own the phrase. We need to be able to say: we're building a workplace; a software factory is one kind of work that workplace can take on, not the definition of the product.

## Related ideas

- [Farms and desks](/wiki/farms-and-desks) — a roster rather than a pipeline.
- [Named teammates](/wiki/named-teammates) — specialists, never anonymous factory hands.
- [Digital labor](/wiki/digital-labor) — enterprise seat replacement, often orthogonal to git.