# Each factory maps a product surface to a coded workflow

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/each-factory-maps-a-product-surface-to-a-coded-workflow/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Zach Lloyd](https://realalpha.app/builders/zach-lloyd/) · Zach Lloyd is founder and CEO of Warp.dev. · Founded Warp and led its April 2026 open-sourcing of its agentic development environment, built around cloud agents.
- Host: [Shawn Wang (swyx)](https://realalpha.app/people/swyx/) · Co-founder, AI Engineer · Wrote “The Rise of the AI Engineer” and founded Smol AI, maker of AI News.
- Show: Latent Space
- Episode: [⚡️ The 2026 Software Factory Infra Stack — Zach Lloyd, Warp.dev](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/), Nov 3, 2026
- Moment: 3:35 to 6:44 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/each-factory-maps-a-product-surface-to-a-coded-workflow/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=215

## Quote

> “You should actually think of a software factory as a very specific thing. Like you should **define your factory in code**.”
> — [Zach Lloyd](https://realalpha.app/builders/zach-lloyd/) at [3:39](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=219) · Latent Space

## Takeaways

1. Use a defined factory for each product surface.
2. Declare repos, skills, MCPs and workflow in code.
3. Let tasks enter through the team's existing tools.

## About this segment

Zach Lloyd says teams should define factories as runnable code, with repos, skills, MCPs and a workflow for a product surface. Work can enter through Slack, a task tracker, GitHub or an API, then follow that workflow.

From “⚡️ The 2026 Software Factory Infra Stack — Zach Lloyd, Warp.dev”, Nov 3, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[3:41](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=221) And what we try to do to make that more concrete is be like, no, no, no. You should actually think of a software factory as a very specific thing. Like you should define your factory in code. You should make sure that the factory has all the workflows, skills, MCPs. Everything is like it's like a concrete thing that you should be able to run at some point in time and measure how it's doing. because people have all sorts of kind of random ideas around what these factories are.

[4:10](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=250) And so for Warp Factories, which is our platform, it's like, well, we say, no, no, no, it's actually, it's a real thing. You can orchestrate it, you can measure it. You have one factory per product surface. And we try to like take it out of the realm of just being like this nebulous, it's a collection of like arbitrary automations and interactive agents into a thing that's an actual. Well, the way to think about a software factory or the way that we think about it, what you're looking at here is Warp Software Factory platform, is a factory operates on some product surface.

[4:42](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=282) So imagine you're building like your mobile app or you're building, you know, your server app or whatever. And the factory itself is operating on a set of repos and it has a set of skills it needs, it has a set of MCPs. And then it has like a workflow associated with it. And this workflow, you know, roughly matches what, you know, your team is probably already doing to make changes to that code base. So there could be a step where you're doing triage, it could be where you're doing specking, implementation. The important thing is like there's some kind of defined workflow, and that that workflow itself is defined in code. So for us, we basically have a YAML file, which says, okay, these are all the repos that you can be using. These are all the MCPs, all of the integrations that are hooked up.

[5:31](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=331) So you basically have this whole thing defined someplace. The way to think about using the factory is that there's actually sort of two personas. So there's someone who is building the product. They're doing product engineering. They're shipping features through a factory. And for those people, the way they use the factory is through their existing tools. So they could be slacking the factory to put work into it.

[5:58](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=358) They could be using a task tracker like Linear or Jira. They could be interacting with the factory through GitHub. They could be calling it via API or MCP. And the metaphor is like you're putting a work item into the factory. And when it goes into the factory, that starts like a predefined workflow. And that workflow is defined in code. Does that make sense so far? I love defining things in code. Yes.

[6:22](https://realalpha.app/v/LL0YmIyBKSU/?t=382) So, okay. So you have this whole thing set up in code. And then once you have that in place, and so the, again, Metaphors like someone starts a task in Slack or in linear or through an automation, like, you know, there's a server error. It all goes through one system is the kind of key thing.