Factory

AI tools for Forward Deployed Engineering — Vasuman Moza, Varick Agents

Jul 28, 2026 · 20:23

Varick Agents CEO Vasuman Moza and head of engineering JD Pruitt explain how forward deployed engineers (FDEs) design AI agents that sit on top of existing enterprise systems like SAP or NetSuite rather than requiring migrations—one customer spent $5M and five years on NetSuite, so Varick drops agents onto those systems. The bottleneck is understanding each business’s unique, undocumented workflows (e.g., when AP fails, Sarah sends to Chris, adding four days of cycle time). FDEs map these processes, re-engineer them around AI (automating four of eight steps, keeping human-in-the-loop for three, fully human for one), then deploy using Varick OS. To scale FDEs without hiring exponentially, Varick built an AI FDE agent that ingests granola notes and Slack threads, uses a Postgres-based dependency graph as a single source of truth, and post-trains open-source models (Kimi K26) to extract the right context and strip redundancy. JD outlines three stages: an engagement agent for querying documentation, a workflow agent that shadows FDEs inside the platform, and a future autonomous agent that handles client change requests (e.g., rerouting a QC report) without FDE involvement.

Don't Build Slop (4 Levels of AI Agent Maturity) - Ara Khan, Cline

May 19, 2026 · 18:52

Ara Khan of Cline presents four levels of AI agent maturity, arguing that most builders suffer from mass psychosis and should focus on thoughtful architecture. Level one is using existing frameworks for rapid prototyping. Level two introduces five rules: treat every agent as a state machine, keep system prompts minimal (e.g., GPT-5.3's prompt is one-third the size of GPT-5's to avoid sensory overload), integrate with a CLI for pseudo-RL pipelines, avoid building slop by designing architecture manually, and master frontier model APIs to leverage reasoning traces correctly. Level three advocates Kanban boards as the ideal UX form factor for managing parallel inference-bound agents, a prediction he made on March 26 that Claude Code shipped ten hours before this talk. Level four involves shipping agents to the cloud for scalability, enabling long-running tasks and parallel execution without local dependencies.

CI/CD Is Dead, Agents Need Continuous Compute and Computers — Hugo Santos and Madison Faulkner

May 13, 2026 · 18:37

Madison Faulkner and Hugo Santos (Namespace) argue that traditional CI/CD is dying because it was built for humans pushing one or two diffs a week; at agent scale, thousands of autonomous agents opening PRs cause runner saturation, cold Docker builds, cache thrash, and merge queues that behave like serialized database locks. They propose replacing PRs with intent and plan fed into an agent loop that performs fast inline validation—builds and tests in the inner loop—while humans review intent-plus-outcome instead of diffs in a premerge queue. The future they envision involves agents exploring multiple commits in parallel for the same plan (a multiverse) where the inner loop must be stateful and extremely fast to keep up with the moving tip of the repo. CI doesn't disappear but shifts into continuous enforcement of invariants and governance within the agent harness.