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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