How to Build an AI Software Factory: Agents That Open, Review, and Merge PRs

An AI software factory is a five-stage system that manages autonomous coding agents through intake gates, isolated execution environments, tool access, automated verification, and human review checkpoints. The key insight is that a single engineer with a coding agent can generate pull requests faster than a team can review them, making the bottleneck not code generation but code review capacity, which companies like Spotify, Stripe, and Sentry have solved by building review infrastructure before deploying agent fleets.