How Factory builds agents that help across the entire SDLC with Matan Grinberg, Founder & CEO

Factory co-founder and CEO Matan Grinberg joins Barr Yaron to talk about the future of agent-driven development, why enterprise migrations are the perfect wedge for AI adoption, and how software engineering is moving toward a world where humans orchestrate instead of implement.

They dive into Factory’s origin story, the challenges of building AI systems for large organizations, and what the world might look like when millions of “droids” (AI agents) collaborate on software. Along the way, Matan shares surprising use cases, lessons from working with enterprises, and how his personal journey—from physics to burritos to building Factory—has shaped his leadership.

This episode is broken down into the following chapters:

00:00 – Intro and welcome

01:06 – Founding Factory: from ChatGPT experiments to AI engineers in every tab

04:05 – Early vision: autonomy for software engineering

06:14 – Why focus on the enterprise vs. indie developers

08:29 – Behavior change and technical challenges in large orgs

10:25 – Using painful migrations as a wedge for adoption

12:20 – The paradigm shift to agent-driven development

15:59 – Ubiquity: making droids available across IDEs, Slack, Jira, and more

17:16 – Why droids need the same context as human engineers

20:15 – Memory, configurability, and organizational learning

23:05 – How many droids? Specialization vs. general purpose agents

25:34 – Bespoke vs. common workflows across enterprises

27:06 – The hardest droid to build: coding itself

28:26 – Testing, costs, and scaling agentic workflows

30:29 – Why observability is essential for trustworthy agents

31:28 – Surprising use cases: PM adoption and GDPR audits

34:02 – Who Factory is building for: PMs, juniors, seniors, and beyond

36:09 – Systems thinking as the core engineering skill

38:09 – Building for enterprise trust: guardrails and governance

40:35 – What’s missing at the model layer today

42:43 – Migrations as a go-to wedge in go-to-market

43:53 – The thought experiment: what if 1M engineers collaborated?

46:07 – Scaling agent orgs: structure, monitoring, and observability

48:46 – Why everything must be recorded for droids to succeed

50:11 – Recruiting people obsessed with software development

51:37 – Burritos, routines, and how Matan has changed as a leader

53:41 – From coffee to Celsius, and why team culture matters most

54:20 – Closing thoughts: the future when agents are truly ubiquitous

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