In my last post, I wrote about moving into factory mode: giving agents outcomes, context and a definition of done, and building the environment that lets them carry the work through.
That opens up a rather interesting question: what would you build if you could put a team of AI agents to work?
Hugo Bowne-Anderson and I are launching Factory Life, a series of six free live sessions exploring that question. We’ll look at how people are using agents, what makes their setups work, where things go wrong, and how this changes what individuals and small teams can attempt.
I’m particularly excited about the range of perspectives. Software development is part of the story, alongside running a business, producing media, doing research and understanding the world that this technology is changing. There’s plenty here for experienced developers, and for people whose expertise lies somewhere else entirely.
Come Inside the Factory
We’re joined by great guests:
Stefanie Hetjens (EVERYWOW), 22 September: Beyond More Output: How a Media Agency Uses AI for Quality. How EVERYWOW uses agents and builds its own tools to improve the work, with lessons from what failed along the way.
Me, 25 September: Five Mistakes People Make with Agentic Factories. The recurring mistakes I see in mindset, setup and oversight, and how to develop a repeatable process you can trust.
Ben Holmes (Warp), 29 September: How Warp Builds Warp using Warp Factories. A look at the product and how Warp puts it to work on its own development.
Tony Simons (Hermes Launch Lab), 2 October: Your AI Workforce: Run an Agent Factory in Hermes Desktop. Tony’s own setup, how he runs work through Hermes, and what he has learned helping others adopt it.
Dror Poleg, 6 October: Thinking About AI, with AI. How Dror uses AI to investigate technological change and its connections to work, the economy and society.
Hugo, 7 October: How I Built a Media Empire With an Agentic Software Factory. How he built a factory around Vanishing Gradients, from research and production to publication and promotion.
There will be presentations, demos, live Q&A, and recordings will be available afterwards.
The series leads into our October course, Build Your Agentic Software Factory, where you’ll set up your own factory and use it to build, verify and publish working software. You’re welcome to join the free series whether or not you plan to take the course.
Join me for Build AI Agents from First Principles
I also want to recommend Hugo’s upcoming workshop, Build AI Agents from First Principles, on 24 September. I’ll be joining it myself.
If you use agents and want to understand how they actually work, this is a great opportunity to build one from scratch. You’ll start with an LLM call, add tools and state, and build the loop that lets an agent decide what to do next. Then you’ll work through context, memory and debugging, before moving to an agent SDK and connecting tools through MCP.
The workshop uses a customer service agent as a concrete project. You should be comfortable reading and making small changes to Python, but you don’t need prior experience building agents.
I like this approach because building the pieces yourself gives you a much clearer understanding of what you’re asking an agent to do, what its environment needs to provide, and where to look when something goes wrong. Those are useful skills for anyone working with factories too.
Get a reader discount on Hugo’s workshop. The link includes the code friendsofeleanor.
Hope to see some of you you there!