Harlan Wilton

Should You Build a Software Factory? Tales from an Open-Source Maintainer

Coding agents helped me write code faster, but I kept running into problems elsewhere in my engineering workflow. Tests passed without proving much. Parallel tasks changed the same files. Reviews piled up. This talk follows the changes I made while building a SaaS and maintaining my open-source projects. I'll use real code and PRs to show what each change solved, and what still needed my attention.

You'll learn how to turn repeated instructions into shared skills, then enforce the important rules with checks. We'll look at tests that exercise behaviour and worktree setups that let agents edit and check changes independently. You'll see why those isolated changes still need to be checked together before merging. I'll show how separate Review and Repair agents handle findings, with a fresh review after every repair. We'll also cover keeping the queue within your review capacity and bringing production failures back as new work. Before leaving agents unattended, we'll look at retry limits and recovery when work gets interrupted. Those improvements eventually became my self-hosted, open-source factory around GitHub issues. We'll open its live board at the end and follow work submitted by the audience. You can take these improvements back to your own workflow, even if you only run one agent.