How to Rebuild Every Workflow with AI (The Playbook) ft. Matan Grinberg

It's kind of on everyone right now to take a sledgehammer to every workflow that you find holy and try to rebuild it with AI to see if you can come up with new efficiencies and new kind of speed ups.

Welcome to the Next Wave podcast. Today we're doing a live episode here in San Francisco and we have Matan Grinberg from Factory, our repeat guest, who the last time he was on here was our biggest episode ever where he did a live demo where he showed how he could clone DocuSign in 20 minutes using factory. So I think you're going to love the conversation, and so let's just get right into it. Matan, welcome back to the Next Wave.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here in person.

Yeah, it's awesome meeting you in person. We've talked online so much and, you know, you're. The first episode that you did on the Next Wave was actually our biggest episode ever. And since then you've. You've raised a Series B, is that correct?

Yeah. So we just raised our Series B. We raised $50 million with some great folks like NEA, Sequoia, JP Morgan, Nvidia. I'm very excited about it.

That's amazing. So, Nvidia, that's like, it seems like one of the best partners you could have and obviously NEA leading the round. And Sequoia, what do you plan to do with the 50 million? That's a lot of money here.

Great question.

It's not a lot, but. No, but, yeah. No, it's a lot of money.

I think for us, the big thing is really building out the team and growing the resources to reach more of the large enterprises that we've been working with so far. So some of our large customers include Ernst and Young, the large accounting firm, as well as MongoDB, buyer and quite a few others. And the reality is to serve these very massive enterprises and to help them with this behavior change. And this transformation of software development actually requires a lot of resources. Generally, like, if you have an org of 50,000 engineers, maybe 5,000 of them are super excited to adopt the coolest and latest AI technology. And then maybe the 45,000 others are like, you know what, I'm actually happy in my vim or in my Emacs, and I don't want to mess around with any of this stuff or kind of change what I've been doing. And so we want to invest in the resources to both build out our engineering and product team so that we can make it that much easier to adopt. And then also our Go to Market team to reach developers and reach these organizations, to raise awareness and make them understand this transformation that's happening. And, you know, going out in the field and helping these developers kind of adopt these new workflows.

Yeah. So I was wondering, like, how much do you have to help these companies? Like, I would imagine that, you know, you show them Factory, you show them a demo, but then like, how do they actually use it and how, you know, how do you get the whole team using it? How much are you having to hold people's hands?

Great question. It really, it's. It's crazy. How much? It depends. One thing that is for sure is just at the end of the day, developers are human. And if you show them something that they used to do that was very painful, that's now going to be a lot less painful. With Factory generally, they're going to start adopting it now. Really, the work is just what is the thing from their seat that's really painful. Then how can we use Factory and the droids to accelerate that? Something that often comes up is migrations or modernizations or refactors. There are very few developers who actually enjoy doing things like that.

Right.

And so kind of going in and getting a migration done with the droids is kind of a quick way to get them to adopt to this new workflow.

And with, with your DA release, like, how do you feel like that went? Like, I feel like it got a lot of attention. Something I heard from people is like, it's kind of. They're kind of confused. Like, is, you know, is this for, like, Vibe coders or that's for like, large enterprises or like, what's the focus?

So, yeah, in May, we released Factory for ga. It was a really great release. We got tens of thousands of new users. But I think the important thing was we released Factory and basically the main way you accessed it at the time was via the web.

Right.

And something that we've learned is that, you know, in this transformation to what we're calling agent native development, the reality is, is you need multiple surfaces where you can engage with these agents with these droids. And we only gave people one surface, which was the web. That's why in this release, we're really having a Surface agnostic or interface agnostic approach. In other words, if you are going to be willing to change your behavior to become agent native, we need to meet you wherever you are, whether that's in the web or in your terminal or in your IDE or In Slack or in Jira or in Linear Wherever you might have an idea of. Here's a task I want to delegate to an agent. We need to meet you where you are and make it very easy for you to do so. Just like if we were co workers and you were like, oh man, here's a perfect task for Maton. You know, you can't only tell me that via email or via Slack. Right. You could tag me in a ticket, you could, you know, send it to me on Slack, you could send me a text, like kind of wherever is easiest for you personally, you'd be able to do that. And we need to provide people kind of a similar ease of use for the droids.

And so that's like if you're going to like a huge organization enterprise, every single individual engineer gets to do that. So like they get to pick like, oh, I want to use it. I think you have a terminal thing coming out.

Yes, that's right.

It's like when I'm doing it web based or terminal or I'm an executive in Slack. Yeah, however you want to use, use it, you can. Is that correct?

Pending like approval from IT to, you know, assuming they give access to these. But basically if you provide access, you can do it via Slack, via, I mean, honestly, via email. Like you can do it obviously in the terminal, but it's really, the point is to kind of mold to whatever, you know, the developer's workflow looks like to make it seamless. Because the reality is we're going from a world where developers wrote 100% of their code to a world where developers will write 0% of their code. And this new primitive, in this world, the new primitive is going to be a delegation. The primitive used to be writing a line of code or writing a function or writing a file. It's now going to be a delegation. And so to kind of bring people into this new world with this new primitive, we need to make that delegation as easy and accessible as possible.

So people like the Primogen and people like that who love like almost like the art of coding, you think that's almost going to be like a, a niche thing in the future where it's like, oh yeah, it's, you know, it's kind of like how you have vinyl records or something like that, you know.

Where it's to a certain extent maybe like the line by line might be, but there's kind of a new art that emerges which is, okay, great, you can delegate to an agent. How much can you parallelize? So Similar. There's kind of an analogy, you know, Nvidia is one of our investors. We love using this analogy between CPUs and GPUs, right. Where CPUs, they're all about processing in series, right. Like, you know, you want to get as many computations as you can done in series in some amount of time. Whereas the big unlock from GPUs was parallelization.

Right.

It turns out for certain tasks like matrix multiplication, you can actually parallelize a lot of the computation. So that instead of like one, you.

Know, operation all at the same time.

Yeah. You could use four or ten or a hundred. And the more you can parallelize, kind of the, the, the faster the, the downstream computation that kind of emerges. A similar thing with agents, which is if you can parallelize and have 20 droids working at the same time or 100 droids working at the same time, then you're way faster. There's kind of an art of like, how do you actually paralyze to 20 agents at a time? That's kind of difficult, but I think that's the new thing that'll emerge.

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There was recently this study that came out from MIT talking about like 95% of AI pilots have been failing.

Yes.

I was really, you know, I know you guys are having like a competition about this, like man versus machine kind of competition upcoming. Maybe it's already live.

That's actually this Saturday. Okay. It'll be live by the time.

Yeah, so it'll already happen. So you can check in and see the results, see who won. I'm kind of betting on machine.

Likewise.

Yeah, but so what are your thoughts on that, that study? And like, you know, some people are saying, like, oh, that's, you know, AI has been just completely overhyped and it's like, this is proof of it.

So, like, I actually think it's a really good wake up call that the way people have been measuring success in these deployments has been flawed. So maybe stepping back, what did the study Say I believe the specific phrasing was 95% of AI adoption efforts in the enterprise were deemed not success, basically were not deemed successful in these enterprise. And so that's like across the, not just software development, but AI across you know, every vertical in the enterprise. And I think the reason is because success criteria has been very ill defined for software development. In particular, the kind of the metrics that people rely on are lines of code generated or self reported developer productivity. But the problem is software development is fundamentally a pipeline and one step of that pipeline is implementing the code.

Right.

But, but the reality is before that there's kind of understanding and planning, then there's the coding itself, but then there's testing and reviewing and documenting. And if you have like a literal pipe and you expand the like radius of one part of that pipe but do nothing to the other parts, you actually don't increase your throughput at all.

Right.

And so it's kind of no surprise to me that if you're just measuring things like lines of code generated, well, you give everyone lines of code generators, you're going to have more lines of code, but you're not going to actually have success in like you're not going to start shipping software faster.

Yeah. What are those lines of code doing as well? Right. Like you could do 10,000 lines of code, they're like, you know, unnecessary.

And someone has to actually go and figure out what are these lines of code doing. And so now there are more people going and reviewing code or adding tests to that code or adding docs and actually ends up not increasing the speed. Which is why like this kind of problem that this MIT study pointed out is why when we do our deployments we're really focused on really what are the business like ROI metrics that matter. It's not lines of code generated. No business is succeeding or failing because of lines of code generated. Right. Like they're succeeding or failing because we missed shipping this feature and then our competitor got it out and we had users churn and now they're going to that tool instead of us and it's whatever causing it. Like those are the things at the business level that matter. And that's why we are focused when we do our deployments on let's get this modernization done faster. Because we can't ship this new feature until we modernize our database.

And you're focused on like business outcomes as well.

Exactly right.

Like when I heard that study, I actually, I thought about you guys. Cause I was like, that's actually something that'd be really great for Factory because like you guys are actually being hands on with, you know, enterprises learning how they're using these tools, helping them like figure out the best way to actually get a great business outcome. Yeah. Whereas like cursor and the other one, there's like, here you go, here's this, you know, cool AI coding tool thing.

And it's kind of, it's kind of what you get when they're. I think most of the tools in the space are focused on the individual and optimizing the individual. Factory is focused on optimizing the team and the organization. And surprise. Software development is a team sport and it really matters to optimize for those team outcomes. It's like similar to, you know, actually we have like a Michael Jordan quote in our office and I think he's kind of a good example of someone who learned that you can optimize like the individual stats of a player. But if you don't end up win, winning the championship at the end of the season, no one cares. No one remembers.

All right, so very similar to like writing more lines of code.

Exactly right. Exactly right.

When GPT 5 came out recently, you know, a lot of people were like kind of saying it's kind of similar to the MIT study. They were like, you know, AI was way overhyped and now like all, you know, we've hit a wall and there's going to be like an AI winter again and all this kind of stuff. Like what are your thoughts on it? Because I thought GPT5 was pretty impressive, like not like revolutionary but like a great step forward. Things just kind of keep going forward and better and better. Like what are your thoughts?

Yeah, so we work closely with the team at OpenAI. So we actually tested internally GPT5 and it was sufficiently good that we changed it to our default model for like the, the self service plan for Factory. But I also think regarding kind of the, the sentiment of like basically there were really high expectations. They thought it was going to be, they thought it was going to be the same jump as like three to four would be four to five.

Right.

But I think the reality is a good way to think about these models is kind of like, I don't know, imagine some subject that you're not a deep expert in. My go to example here is like biology. I studied physics. I wasn't that deep in biology. How easy is it for you to tell the difference between someone who studied biology in high school versus college? Pretty easy. Maybe on the order of a few seconds. You can tell the difference. What about the difference between someone who studied it in undergrad versus PhD? Maybe it takes you a couple minutes. What about like a postdoc versus a professor? If you don't know anything about biology, it'll actually take you kind of a long time to figure out that difference. I think it's kind of similar as these models get better and better. For most generic tasks, GPT 4 and 5 will perform just as well because like you know, shocker to implement, like I don't know, quicksort. GPT 4 and 5 will be able to do it. Now obviously as the context gets bigger and like the problem gets more niche or really as you're getting to like the tail ends of the distributions of these models and their performance, that's when you'll notice the difference. Only a few people are aware of those differences at those tail ends. So like for the generic user or for someone kind of outside of domain, it's really hard to tell the difference. And I think having the expectations that there's going to be some obvious like step function difference between these models, it's like assuming that as a non expert in biology you notice the difference between like a professor who's been a professor for one year versus a 20 year one on one. It's like it's outside of your domain. You might not just not be able to notice quickly.

Yeah, you know, it feels like ever since 01 really to be honest, like a lot of like when 01 first came out I was actually doing a live episode with Matt Wolfe, my co host in Boston and we, it was right when 01 came out and I was like this is huge. Like there's a new paradigm has been unlocked with reasoning and now you can just throw more compute at the models and it'll get smarter and smarter. And a lot of people were just like we're not getting that. And they were like oh this is like it takes longer and like the answer is slightly better. I was like. And it made me realize like there's already a thing where I think most people can't recognize how much better the models are getting. Right. And just like what you were just explaining and it's going to become more and more important for them to actually like see what the end result is.

Yeah, and actually I think 01 is a good example where in this analogy of like whatever, high school, college, it's kind of like the non reasoning models are like a gut reaction from like whatever professor, postdoc college student and then the reasoning models Are like, have them go and sit down and do something for a day. And we end up being impressed more by that then like. So in the analogy, it's like having a college student go and write you an essay on some topic in biology versus ask a professor for like a gut response on something.

Right.

And I think now since we're reaching the ends of our distributions for some of these things, so like, we're basically at the point where a lot of the users can't tell the difference between a gut response from a college student versus a professor. What we are now impressed by is like, oh, but look, they just wrote this essay, so that's impressive. So that must be smart. Right? And I think now we're kind of, as we see these models, it seems like the general consensus response gets more impressed by almost operational things like write me an essay and, and like put it in this file format and make it nice with pretty images. Like, that's not necessarily like deep intelligence to create images, but it's like in the process of building it, it's like, oh, this is cool. This is like convenient. Right? And that makes it feel like a.

And most people, they saw that, they're going to think it's a better model, right?

Oh, it's smarter. It's like. But in this analogy, like that high school biology student could easily that it doesn't require more intelligence. It's more just like the mechanics of how it.

Yeah. Knowing how to put everything together.

Exactly. Right.

Yeah. So. So are you still like, really optimistic on like AI, do you think after GPT5 came out, did it change anything in your mindset or like, we're still just thinking to keep getting better and better.

I think, I think it was a, a reality check that it's not going to like, be this sudden, you know, super intelligence knows everything, can do all these like, crazy things, but it's more like a. And it, I think in the general, like, kind of mind space, it's been a reminder that intelligence is not always like in your face obvious because GPT5 is significantly better than GPT4, obviously.

Yeah.

But sometimes it shows itself in subtle ways in terms of how it deals with context of like enormous code bases or how when you give it like hundreds of files to deal with and it needs to synthesize two new files or make these modifications, can it handle that with all of those in context or is it going to forget some of them? And I think those are the nuances where you really see the, the performance improvements emerge. So I think that's very interesting. I think also there's now it feels like we're moving towards a little bit of a shift in the model development side where really RL is where a lot of that alpha is going to be found in these new models as well as some of the stuff that we just mentioned about like the convenience things or the presentation things or like the kind of little in betweens that are not that like intellectually hard to do, but make it more of a convenient setup for like output.

Yeah, it feels like the in between things and the techniques. That's where OpenAI and Anthropic are really, you know, the leaders right now. Like because xai they're like catching up in computer. Like maybe they have most compute, I'm not sure exactly, it's always changing. But even though they have more compute, it still feels like GPT5 is better. Is that mainly just because like they have better techniques you think? Or like what do you, what do you think?

I think it's probably makes it that they probably spend more time on some of like the coding RL environments. But in terms of kind of like velocity and acceleration of model quality, Groq is ridiculous. It is spinning up the data center so quickly and like the delta that they've had like from like the GROQ series of models in a vacuum, if the other model providers didn't exist, this would be like the craziest thing ever it's ever happened. It's like it's just because there are kind of so many models everywhere, it's hard to realize the pace that they've had. So it's.

Yeah. And Elon Musk is also kind of controversial right now. So like some people are like love GROK and some people absolutely hate it.

What I think is interesting with FCI is they have a lot of access to data, but not coding data yet. Now a couple years ago you could have said, great, they have smart people, but they don't have access to Data Centers and GPUs and you can see how quickly they solve that problem. So I think a looming thing is, well, they don't have access to all.

The code, so why do they not have access to it? But like anthropic and OpenAI. OpenAI probably through Microsoft is that maybe GitHub.

So anthropic does because they're like enterprise is huge for them and they're one of the most commonly used like APIs for coding. OpenAI as well has a pretty sizable chunk on a relative basis, they're More consumer. But they do have a very large enterprise chunk, xai, just because it's a new player. There aren't really enterprises who are like, XAI shops. Right. Like, that just doesn't really exist. But again, a couple years ago, someone could have said that about them in GPUs and data centers, and you've seen how quickly they've addressed that. So I think what I'd be looking out on the XAI side is what they do to get that enterprise data. Not even just coding, but just generally because, like, they're not, as it stands today, you know, mid-2025. They're not one of the most used APIs in the enterprise, but we'll see how they solve it.

Yeah, I do wonder, like, if people are underestimating with xai, the fact that Elon Musk has access to more power, like, in terms of, like, batteries and things like that. Like, because I, you know, I've been looking at possibly building a deus in there with some. Some partners. Nice. And we were like, looking at, like, should we build or acquire or, like, what's the strategy there? And when you look at building some of this stuff, you're, like, waiting, like, five years right now. Like, the wait times.

Yeah.

And so I do wonder if people are not realizing, like, he possibly could get around that with, like, all the different technologies, you know, he has access to his batteries from Tesla, et cetera. That seems like a gigantic advantage. Maybe open AI will have partners that will help them get around.

There's one thing that time has shown is that Elon will use his advantages to whatever leverage he can to surpass competitors. And so.

And he's really good in the physical world. It's actually this starts to become a physical world thing because how fast can you build the data center? Because if it is coming down to data centers.

Yeah. That's especially given the exponential nature here. Like, whatever is the bottleneck. You know, it's kind of like whack a mole where, okay, this thing, you know, GPUs was the bottleneck. You buy it from someone else, then this becomes the bottleneck. Eventually that looks like, you know, potentially energy or like, potentially owning the, like, physical hardware for these things. The second it gets into that domain, XAI seems like they're in a pretty good spot.

So in the future, do you think we have, like, data centers that are just like 100 floors tall or like, they're out in space?

Or, like, the ROI for building new data data centers is very high and uncapped in which case we're going to keep building it. Now what that looks like is, you know, if they're underground, above ground, stacked flat, whatever. I think that's outside of my domain of expertise. Yeah, but it doesn't seem obvious to basically like I don't see when it like the exponential like tapers off, it seems like it keeps going. There's going to be something, I'm sure maybe that's a new like algorithmic innovation where it actually like you need less or something.

But right to me, right on device or something. Or you don't need it like in the cloud essentially.

Yeah. Or maybe it's something that we were talking about earlier where actually most people are satisfied with that like college level, you know, intelligence and those tail ends aren't as important and aren't worth the marginal cost.

Right.

But for the enterprise I think that'll always be valuable because it feels like.

The enterprise will always need the smartest model possible. But the average person like yeah, helps me create a document or whatever which.

Actually it's funny that you mentioned that that reminds me of like some of the IDE tools out there or a kind of a key assumption has been for their like self service plans to subsidize the tokens to get like bring in users and then eventually model costs go down and then now your margin becomes okay, so you put the price.

There and the model goes down your profit.

And very interesting phenomenon that has occurred is that the best models are basically the same price. You know, the best model today in a year will go down in price but then the best model there will.

Also go up in the future as well. That's actually something I predicted last year. I was like okay, now that O1 is out, that changes everything. Just like because like yeah, the smartest model, like why is that going to cost $100? It could cost $100,000.

Right. But it seems, it seems like regardless, like even though model costs are going down, it seems like loosely flat is the cost of the best model. But another phenomenon has also been self service users want the best model. So in theory it's like, oh hey, we're subsidizing because the model cost is going to go down, but the demand for the best model has remained the same. So it's an interesting dynamic where you kind of are margin negative under the assumption that okay, our margins will get better once the underlying LLM cost goes down, but the users keep wanting the best model.

Yeah, it's hard to switch too because like I noticed, you know, I'VE like, signed up for the premium models of all these, like, you know, OpenAI anthropic XAI, all of them Google's. I've tried all of them. Like the 200 to 250, you know, dollars a month plans, and I've canceled them. After a while, I'm like, oh, a new model came out and then now I'm kind of getting tired of doing it. So I'm like, maybe I'll just stick with OpenAI1 and keep paying for it. But it's hard to go back, like, if you have any, like, really hard problems, like, Pro is so much better.

Yeah. And there's also probably something psychological, like, you want to use the best.

I want. I want the Pro one. It's like getting a MacBook Pro versus, like a. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's. It's kind of an interesting dynamic there with. I wonder if. I think a big question is going to be, is there going to be a quality of model where this phenomenon of, like, okay, best model gets cheaper, but now there's a new best that's more expensive. Does that stop? And people are like, actually, I don't care about the best model. So far, that hasn't happened. And I'm curious.

I think with professionals, it won't.

Yeah.

Or like, if people. At the highest levels, it won't.

That's what we've seen.

But maybe, like, average people, like, I would. Yeah. Like, I'm sure at some point that's, like, probably soon. Probably like in two or three years. Like, what else are they going to need besides, like, it gets better at certain different things. Like you said creating a document or creating. Or creating an email. Okay. It got better at these different little use cases. But the intelligence of the model won't have to get.

I agree. But also human nature seems such that. Well, just like, keep filling it in. Like, even now, like, some people will say, like, if you show to anyone from 10 years ago, the models that we have now, they would like, say, this is AGI. Unequivocally. Yeah. Meanwhile, now the goalposts have shifted so much because it's like, oh, but now.

If you say AGI, you're like, oh.

I'm like, you know, what's the definition? Yeah.

I've stopped tweeting as much because, like, yeah, I was like, one of the guys like, yeah, this is basically AGI. And they're like, you're insane. I'm like, yeah. Back five years ago, like, everybody would have said, this is like. Like, people in Silicon Valley would have said this is AGI or close. Yeah, I'm sure it's not perfect at everything. It's not a human. That doesn't necessarily, you know, AGI doesn't necessarily mean it's like human level at everything. It's better than humans at many things as of right now.

And I think also we as humans generally respond to sudden change more so than slow change. And so like if you were to show GPT5 to someone in 2015, that's a sudden change. That's like, oh my God, this is the craziest thing ever.

They would be freaking out. Like I was here then I was in San Francisco then.

And like, this is the most insane thing ever.

I, yeah, I remember. But then I started looking into AI. Like I bought Nvidia stock, which I would have bought more, but bought Nvidia stock and. Cause like, okay, so AI is going to be huge in the future. Nvidia's going to be powering that.

We notice the like large deltas of like whatever, 2015, no good models.

Yeah, whatever.

If we showed some GPT5, whereas GPT4 to 5, it's like really good to like also insanely good. It feels like I'll barely get changed, whatever. And so I think it's, it's an interesting aspect of human nature where it's. We like the big deltas and we can't notice like the small ones that have been kind of adding up, I guess so.

One last thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, obviously there was a lot of news around Devon acquiring Windsurf. And obviously, you know, people compare you to Devin's. I would love to hear your thoughts on that deal. Maybe I don't know if you, how much you want to talk about it, but like how like if someone was considering like, you know, should they pick Devon or Factory? Like what's the main differences as of right now?

Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, huge amount of respect for both the team at Cognition and the team at Windsurf. I think that acquisition was great, especially for the folks that were left behind from the Google deal. So I'm glad that there was kind of a setup there that hopefully worked for the people there. I think the biggest difference is it shows that they're kind of taking this approach of like really anchoring back to the ide. Whereas what we're focused on is a little bit like kind of forward looking of okay, the IDE has been the optimal UI for the last 15 years. Let's now move to this future, which is agent, native and meet people in the ide, but kind of not have IDE as the fundamental primitive. And so from my perspective is like, on the product side, it seems like it's a little bit like almost anchoring to what was. And our point is a little bit more like we want to make sure we meet developers where they are. We can, we are IDE agnostic. You can delegate to droids in whatever ide, whatever terminal, emacs, vim, whatever you want, you can, you can delegate to droids. But I think the end goal and what we want to help developers find is that the new optimal UI and the new interaction pattern is going to look very different. You're not going to have like this single file viewer because you're not going to be looking at lines of code.

I saw someone talking about like, what does cursor 2.0 look like? Or what's the next cursor? I'm like, it's already here. It's like factory or.

Yeah, and I think that's right. In particular, you know, we talked about going from that world of developers writing 100% of their code to developers writing none of it. I think from our perspective, it's, I think, and I think I mentioned this last time, but it, it's like the Henry Ford quote. You ask people what they want, they'll say, faster. Horses. We're building the cars. And cars are a transformative technology. But importantly, you can't just pump out the Model T and just throw it on any dirt road. In fact, cities have to change a little bit. Like in the world where there were horses and even San Francisco, by the way, there are some great YouTube video, like archive YouTube videos of like San Francisco in the early 1900s. They're like, on Market street, which is right next to us, there are like horses going by their, like, stables. Like, the whole city dynamic is very different when you have these living beings that are like your means of transport. And turning San Francisco into what it is now, you have to pave the roads, you have to build gas stations. Like, these are things that are slightly different. And we're seeing this with the enterprises as well, where if you want to just throw in agents into your engineering org and you don't do any of this like road paving or creating of gas stations, they're not going to succeed. You're going to have this problem of generating a ton of code, but. But then some human has to review it all. Whereas if instead you do kind of the upfront work of making sure you have really good CICD and pre commit hooks and monitoring and observability and like, you know, comprehensive testing. Then you set up these agents for success such that they can actually, you know, go and drive and not, you know, break down every, every once in a while. And so, you know, from our perspective it's kind of like, are you building for the world of horses or cars? And that's kind of a thing that we ask ourselves a lot. And from my perspective, kind of going like anchoring back onto the ide feels a little bit like building for the horses again. And you know, from our perspective it's more we need to pave the roads, but let's make sure that the roads, you know, don't hurt a horse's hooves. Let's say like you can still use it, but we're still, we're going in that direction towards the future. I think that's really important for us.

Yeah, I probably should disclose that I invested in Factory and part of the reason too is like, I feel like, you know, yeah, you guys are creating the cars. Like, like, yeah, cursor is great now, but where they're going in the future, you're already there. So I think by the time they realize that, I think you'll be way ahead. It's my personal thing. So if someone's listening to this episode right now, like how can they get some value out of Factory? How can they try it out and what would be like the best thing that they could just try and kind of start to understand?

Yeah, I mean, I think for non technical folks, just go to Factory AI, you can sign up for a free trial and try out Factory. You know, you can build something 0 to 1. Like for more technical folks, I think, you know, whatever environment I challenge, you know, whatever niche environment that you think maybe won't support agents, chances are, you know, Factory will be able to support that. Whether it's through the terminal, through your ide, whatever your development workflow is. Go in Factory AI, sign up, try out the droids. And I think very importantly, it's kind of on everyone right now to take a sledgehammer to every workflow that you find holy and try to rebuild it with AI to see if you can come up with new efficiencies and new kind of speed ups.

Because the technology is amazing. It feels like a lot of people are just trying to do small little iterative changes, like it's capable of so much more of it.

And as a very habit oriented person, I constantly need to remind myself, like, everything is changing so quickly. There are probably much more efficient ways to do the things that I'm currently doing. And so it's like, you need to be comfortable with the uncomfortableness of. I know I've done it this way for, you know, 10 years, right? I'm going to break that down and like, kind of rederive what is the new way I want to be.

It's really hard for humans, right? We have all these habits that are. It's more efficient for our brain to have the habits.

I literally eat the same thing every morning for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner. I'm the most habit oriented person. But I think even still, it's really important to do this.

Madonna it's been awesome. It's been great doing it in person versus just online.

And yeah, thanks for having me.

Sa.