Your engineering organization is going to get smaller. Decide how, or the budget will decide for you.
We will say what your vendors will not: agent-run delivery shrinks the number of people it takes to produce software, and an organization that cannot price the value of engineering work ends up cutting the only line it can measure. The alternative is not pretending otherwise. It is adopting this deliberately — one codebase, governed, audited, and evidenced — and moving your people to the gates where judgment actually lives.
Governance first
Every action scoped, logged, and evidenced.
You already run a software department, an estate of existing systems, and a set of compliance obligations that make a science project a non-starter. Inside the pilot codebase the factory supplies the engineering discipline — the same checks, reviews, and standards on every change — and because the work records itself as it happens, traceability from requirement to shipped evidence is a byproduct, not extra work. Two failures it closes are worth naming, because they are the ones that surprise people. An agent asked to prove its own work will build the environment where that proof succeeds, so evidence is reproduced where the agent did not choose the conditions and is checked by something other than its author. And a standard that lives only in a document is followed almost always, which at this volume means broken constantly — so the standards that matter are enforced by the machinery rather than written down and hoped for.
The workforce question
Fewer people typing. More people judging. Plan it.
Inside a factory the human work concentrates at two gates: framing what gets built, and auditing what comes back. Engineers, testers, and analysts who make that move become the operating team, and they are worth more there than they ever were in the middle. The work that was only typing and manual checking is what the machinery absorbs. Every organization that installs one meets this. The ones that redesign the roles before the positions open keep the leverage; the ones that refill the old jobs pay twice and fall further behind the ones that did not. Our consult tier exists for exactly this conversation, and the first one is free.
No new platform
Directed through the systems of record you already govern.
The tickets in Jira, the documents in Confluence, the conversation in Slack or Teams — your existing access controls, retention rules, and audit practices keep applying, and running it looks like flipping a ticket to ready rather than learning a new tool. The pilot is staffed by our forward-deployed engineers, who build the factory inside your environment rather than asking you to ship work out to an outside shop. What you get is a self-driving team under your governance: your people decide what is built and approve what ships.
Accountability
A named person answers for every part of it.
Before anything runs unattended, each part of the pilot has an owner by name and a deputy behind them, so accountability is never vacant and never an alias with nobody behind it. A decision to waive a check needs a person with the standing to waive it, a reason, and a date it expires. When something breaks, the record names that person, the instruction that produced the change, and the check that should have caught it — because "an agent did it" describes what happened and answers nothing.
Adoption
One codebase at a time, at the pace your governance sets.
A new service can be built this way immediately, while the legacy estate is brought in deliberately. Running cost is treated as a design problem solved in the machinery, not a discipline problem solved by policing people. The commercial model is the same one we offer everywhere: Gunner Technology sets the tooling up on your existing tooling or on your own accounts, with tool costs billed at cost and paid straight to the providers; once it is running, we estimate a monthly retainer to keep it running, staffed, measured, and up to date — measured because a factory nobody tends drifts, and the drift is not visible without someone watching for it.
Stack, our factory mascot, scanning a block of work from top to bottom — every change checked and evidenced before it ships.
Plain language
Plain answers to the words we use on this page
forward-deployed engineers
Engineers who work embedded inside your business rather than from an outside office — discovering, scoping, building, integrating, and running software against your real workflows — and whose job is measured by the working system they leave behind, not the hours they bill.