How to Build a Software Factory That Improves Itself - Zach Lloyd, Warp

Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp and former engineering lead on Google Docs, explains why companies are moving from engineers prompting agents on their laptops to sandboxed cloud software factories. He makes the case for treating your factory as infrastructure that's open, works with your existing tools and is defined in code. He demos Warp Factories: visibility into every agent run, LLM-judged scores, a self-improvement loop that proposes fixes to the factory itself, and benchmarks built from your own past tasks to compare cost and quality across models. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 1:12 From interactive prompting to automated development 2:21 Why local agents hit limits 3:08 What a cloud software factory is 4:03 Treat your factory as infrastructure 5:15 Own your data and compute 6:01 Measure on your own data 6:55 Product engineers and factory engineers 7:51 Demo: Warp Factories 10:33 Defining the factory in code 12:01 Scoring agent runs 13:21 The self-improvement loop 14:42 Benchmarks on your own tasks 17:15 The factory stack 17:57 Q&A Zach Lloyd https://www.warp.dev Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!