yeiniel

In my previous post I built a team of blank actors: engineers that start with the same few lines of instructions and learn their jobs by email from an authority. A builder and a verifier came out of that, and a fizzbuzz went from request to signed push to PASS to report. I ended that post with three questions: what is the right size of thing for one agent to own, how does a factory add capacity, and how good must the starting point be. They were questions for a later run, on a real job. This post is about the fourth proof of concept, and that real job. I have a real problem at home: my family needs a shared list of chores, something my wife, my kid and I can all add to and tick off, and I want to host it myself on an old Android TV box I no longer use. The question for me was: can the factory, changed as little as possible, take that on, with me as the customer, more than one builder at once, and an AI in the lead's chair instead of me? As in the previous posts, I did this tog...

In my previous post I built a small software factory out of Unix mail: a builder and a verifier, each one a Unix user who gets "You have new mail", plus a post office. I finished that post with two problems still open. The verifier could only judge what the builder decided to describe in an email, because the two shared no workspace. And the roles were prompt files that I had written into the repository, so the builder and the verifier were only what I had told them to be. This post is about the third proof of concept. The question for me was simple: can a factory come out of blank actors plus an authority, instead of hard-coded roles? Every actor starts with the same few lines. It is an engineer on a team, it has an authority, and mail is how it works. What it is responsible for, it learns from the human, by email. As in the first post, I did this together with an AI agent (Claude Code). In my January post about AI (in Spanish) I wrote that I can't accept something...

"Agentic software factory" became the phrase of 2026. StrongDM decided no human would write or review code. OpenAI shipped about a million lines in five months with a handful of engineers. Uber says about 70% of its pull requests now come from agents. The picture is always a production line: planner agents, coder agents, tester agents, reviewer agents, and engineers who design the line instead of writing code. I wanted to try one. Before building anything, though, I asked a more basic question: why would I want a factory at all, rather than a single actor that produces software? This post covers where that question took me, from first principles to two small proofs of concept built with the most old-fashioned tool I could find: Unix mail. I did this exploration together with an AI coding agent (Claude Code), in a loop of research, argument and building. Some of the best turns came from pushing back on its answers, and I'll point those out as they come. Does softwar...