Factory rebuilt its Droid coding agent to run inside customers' own clouds, plans to open source the compute layer
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-11-03
In an AI Engineer talk, Nikhil Harithas of Factory explains why and how they rebuilt their coding agent Droid to run on any compute inside a customer's own cloud.
- Motivation: banks and other heavily regulated customers can't let agents borrow your identity and run on your machines — none of the SaaS defaults worked;
- Architecture: a control plane with a compute gateway and relay for bring-your-own-compute; model calls use bring-your-own-key and stay inside the customer's VPC;
- Also covers snapshots and forking, drivers, and the hard parts of managing compute;
- The team plans to open source the compute layer, arguing agents shouldn't care where they run.
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