What happens to the software factory when agents substantially increase its capacity for realization?
To answer that question, this chapter begins with an older change in production. The Industrial Revolution did more than increase the power available to make things. It changed how production was controlled. As machinery increased the rate of fabrication, engineers developed ways to organize production and to specify and measure the bounds within which its products had to remain.
This chapter develops the software factory from that history and then examines contemporary agentic software factories. DocAble provides a case observed from the inside, including how its factory changed as production accelerated. Public accounts from other organizations show how different factories divide realization and supervision under different constraints.
Depth and breadth
MAGE was developed through one deeply observed production build. That case provides chronology, mechanism, and repeated observations within one system.
Independent industrial accounts provide a different kind of evidence: variation across systems built by other organizations under different constraints.
The first shows how the method developed. The second asks whether the same engineering problems and responses appear elsewhere.
New here: Software factory · Agentic software factory · Support ratio · Delegation staircase
§5.1 develops the software-factory concept from the history of manufacturing and asks what a production system must know and control when fabrication outruns direct human supervision. §5.2 examines one such factory from the inside: DocAble, where agentic realization grew alongside the engineering structures needed to direct, evaluate, and admit its work. §5.3 then examines independently developed industrial systems to ask which of these pressures recur under different organizations, technologies, and allocations of human and machine authority. §5.4 then returns to process design and tolerance to interpret what these different factories imply for the engineer's role and for the purchased factory. A short coda prepares the ground for Chapter 6's elaboration of the theory needed to explain these differences.