The software factory is already here.

Use the AI model Pareto frontier to eliminate candidates that offer no advantage on the measures you care about. Then test the survivors on your own work before giving them a production job. A place on the line earns a trial; it doesn't settle the buying decision.

Catch prompt cache regressions by replaying a long agent session through the current and proposed harness, then comparing what changed in each request and what the provider processed again. Put that check before the upgrade reaches your working agents; a correct answer can hide a more expensive route to it.

Refresh AI agent evaluation tasks when their results have shaped the next revision, or when the work you need done has changed. Keep the old tests for catching regressions, but require fresh evidence before calling the next version an improvement.

Giving everyone an AI tool used to look like a strategy. Now it is the starting line, and a crowded one at that.

When a coding agent wastes the night, burns the expensive model on grunt work, or asks permission to name a branch, the model is not the whole problem. The factory around it is unfinished.

Your coding agent can spend its budget reading files, searching the repository and interpreting tool results before it changes anything. Give that exploration an allowance and require it to produce a useful finding before the factory pays for a wider search.

Agents can remove the mistakes a compiler catches and multiply the ones it cannot. If security still waits for a person at the end, the factory has already outrun its brakes.

A factory that finishes every task and forgets what happened is not getting smarter. It is paying to rediscover the same surprise forever.

Compare AI model costs by running the same work with reusable context already cached, with no reusable cache, and through the fallback route. A model that wins only after repeated runs has earned a narrower job than your default production route.

If agents produce work faster than your system can judge and release it, you did not create productivity. You created inventory.

An agent that has to ask one central system about every move is not autonomous. An agent that never has to ask is not controlled.

An architecture diagram that waits for someone to explain it is not guiding your coding agents. It is decorating the wall while they make decisions without it.