850 PRs a Week: How Tessl Runs a Software Factory

The software factory that put up 850 pull requests in a week, with 85 to 90% of them handled by agents end to end. Tessl's Head of Product Dru Knox on how it actually got built, why it started with skills rather than automation, and the two things nobody expects a factory to change. Guy Podjarny digs into the skills-to-loops-to-factory path, and what breaks when you skip a step.

What we cover:
– What a software factory actually is, and how it differs from a pile of disconnected automations
– Loop engineering: turning a skill into something that gets better every time it runs
– Why context engineering has to come before automation, and what stalls when it doesn't
– The two gains nobody forecasts from extra agent capacity: quality and fungibility
– Verifiers and evals, or how you enforce a standard that agents are free to ignore
– Context-driven code review, and why a general-purpose reviewer plateaus

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:23 - Kikimora: Tessl's own dark factory
00:04:45 - Skills, loops and factories, defined
00:09:09 - 850 PRs a week, and the road to it
00:11:27 - The surprises: quality and fungibility
00:13:16 - Why a factory has to be context centric
00:16:40 - Context-driven code review and the wall teams hit
00:22:51 - Skills inventory across your whole code estate
00:28:38 - Verifiers, evals and enforcing what you wrote down
00:37:30 - Loops, automations and owning your software factory

Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
https://tessl.co/coi

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If you've hit the plateau Dru describes, tell us where it stopped compounding for you.