SRE#01
Never: merges, edits prod by hand, or deploys himself.
Developer#02
Never: merges, deploys, pushes to main, touches the cloud.
Support#03
Never: sends free text to a customer or moves money on a hunch.
Code review#04
Never: runs the PR's code with secrets, posts to GitHub himself, or obeys instructions hidden in a diff.
Product#00
Donald reads it. Before drafting a reply he checks the customer's recent Kinetik activity: failures, whether the support skill loaded, problem reports. Compensation needs a basis the server verifies from its own records.
Gilfoyle ships it. The agent runtime and its sandbox image roll to prod through the same deploy gate as every other service.
Dinesh tests the runtime too. For an agent change a green preview isn't the whole story, so he also runs the runtime's own test suite.DonaldsupportGilfoyleSREDineshdeveloper
Jian-Yangcode reviewSwipe sideways to follow the baton β
A software factory is the full loop: collect signals, prioritise, orchestrate, execute, validate, test in production, iterate. "Generating code, writing code, that's the easy part."
Tereza TΓΕΎkovΓ‘, Factory
How we built itSignals come in from alerts, customer tickets, tracker issues delegated to a bot and Kinetik's own problem reports. Dinesh builds, Gilfoyle ships through a gate and keeps watching prod after, and the verdict lands back on the customer's ticket. A ticket is Done only when it's on prod, not when it's merged.
Generation is cheap and scales; review doesn't. Validators should check code they did not write, and autonomy should grow only as far as verification keeps up.
Addy Osmani Β· Tereza TΓΕΎkovΓ‘, FactoryHow we built itNo PR before proof: Dinesh brings up a preview env for his branch, runs QA himself and reports what he poked and what he saw. Then someone else checks: Jian-Yang reviews every PR, bots' included, and each finding is fixed or rebutted in writing; Gilfoyle, not the author, verifies the rollout through a gate written in code.
"A healthy AI software factory isn't a factory with the humans removed." Some go fully dark anyway: StrongDM's charter says code must not be written or reviewed by humans.
LaunchDarkly Β· StrongDMHow we built itWe run lit on purpose. People press four kinds of buttons: words to a customer, money, merge, and a deploy the gate isn't sure about. Everything between them is delegated. New autonomy is earned: Donald's refunds ran in shadow mode until humans agreed with him often enough, then were switched on one action at a time.
factory bill of materials
all MIT Β· no seats Β· no sales call
A bought platform freezes last quarter's idea of an agent. Ours swapped a runtime with one pull request.
Runtimes are a commodity. The gates, guardrails and who presses which button are your process. No vendor ships that, so you write it anyway.
When an agent touches prod or money, you want to read every line between the model and the side effect.
You own the upgrades, the security and the on-call for your on-call bot. For a startup, that's a good trade.
π¨ Every illustration on this page was generated with Kinetik.
Portraits are based on photos on Wikimedia Commons by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0), Colleen Sturtevant (CC BY 4.0), Daniel Benavides (CC BY 2.0), CaseyJNewell (CC BY-SA 4.0), Vbrunophotog (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Fung Bros. (CC BY 3.0); the illustrations are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Silicon Valley is an HBO series; this page is a fan tribute by the Kineto team and is not affiliated with HBO or the cast.