Dru Knox defines a software factory as a system in which agents produce the shipped product while engineers improve the machinery around them. He separates autonomy, the amount of corrective intervention required, from automation, the amount of work teams trust to run without manual review, and treats product quality as a distinct measure.
Dru Knox describes three feedback loops. Cheap inner-loop checks help coding agents correct work before a pull request; more expensive outer-loop checks support review after submission; a meta loop studies failures, corrections and user feedback to improve the earlier checks. This is a proposed engineering approach, not evidence that every team can remove human oversight.
Dru Knox argues that improvement requires a legible control plane, usable execution environments and governed access to the tools and services agents need. Shared issues, pull requests and playbooks make mistakes available for analysis, but infrastructure setup, rapidly changing practices and unplanned improvement work remain practical obstacles.
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