Five Mistakes People Make with Agentic Factories

I can ask an agent to do something, watch it produce good work, and still spend the next hour telling it what to do next. The agent is busy. So am I. Somehow, I’m still deciding every next step, with another conversation to attend to.Moving into factory mode changes that relationship. I give the agent an outcome, the context it needs, and a way to check its work. It carries the task through, including dealing with problems along the way, and comes back with a result I can inspect.I gave a Factory Life talk about five mistakes that get in the way of that shift. I’ve seen these patterns in my own factories, in my work with larger teams, and in conversations with other people building theirs. and I are teaching Build Your Agentic Software Factory. If you’d like to build your own, there’s more about the course at the end.What I Mean by a FactoryA factory is a repeatable way to get work done through agents. You provide direction; the agents have tools, context, and enough room to make…