Trying the Software factory pattern. · Will Larson · Irrational Exuberance, September 20, 2026
A goal loop needs task state an agent can audit, and that is the expensive part
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Larson gives the pattern a one-sentence definition: "The software factory pattern is looping on a
broad goal, and then relying on the harness to drive progress towards that goal." His first
implementation is an agent skill called /linear-project-loop, which reads a Linear project and
audits its goal definition against two things: an RFC in Notion describing the goals and how they
are measured, and a Datadog dashboard or Snowflake queries that measure progress. If either is
missing, the loop iterates with you on creating it before doing any work. It then reviews the
project's metrics and issues, adds issues for newly identified work, updates the ones that moved,
and works the non-blocked tasks, which he says is usually writing a pull request, updating one,
pinging for review, or asking a clarifying question.
He also lists what changed at Imprint first: every engineer on Claude Code daily in January, roughly ten local workspaces each holding a checkout of every repository in April so agents could open cross-repository pull requests, a company-wide migration off Jira onto Linear in June, and in July an orchestrated harness "which internally we call 'Agent Fleet', along the lines of Stripe's Minions." He attributes the term itself only tentatively, writing that its AI-context origin is "slightly messy to attribute, but I think it might be Justin McCarthy in February 2026's Software Factories And The Agentic Moment." The post reports no measurement of the pattern's effect, and Larson says he is still running the loop locally.
Why it matters: The definition is cheap and the prerequisite is not. A loop that audits its own goal has to read the goal from somewhere and write progress back, which is why the Jira migration and the metrics access come before the loop in Larson's sequence rather than after it. His own summary of that is the useful sentence: "all of the pieces here compound only to the extent that you have the other pieces." If your project state lives in a tool your agents cannot read and update, this pattern is not yet available to you, and the work in front of you is the migration, not the skill.