Factory CEO says 90% of coding tokens will run asynchronously in a future 'dark factory'

Training Data (Sequoia) · rss · 2026-07-21

Factory CEO Matan Grinberg argues that autonomous coding agents need a model-agnostic harness, not tight model/harness co-design.

Key points from the interview:

Factory started building fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023, before most enterprises were ready.
The company says it survived a difficult “journey in the desert,” even returning nearly all revenue to customers when the product did not yet make developers obsessed.
Grinberg believes a harness that works across many models avoids overfitting to any single lab’s model.
He expects open-weight models such as GLM to take most tokens by staying one generation behind frontier models at much lower cost.
He predicts CIOs will soon justify tokens the way they justify headcount, and that 90% of coding tokens will run asynchronously in a future “dark factory” where software builds itself.

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