Factories > Overview
Warp Factories overview
Warp Factories is open infrastructure for building your own software factory, defining workflows as code, and measuring and improving results.
Warp Factories is open, flexible infrastructure for building your own software factory. Define your workflows as code, connect them to your repositories and tools, and use evaluation and benchmarks to measure results and compare changes.
A factory is the system of development workflows you configure on that infrastructure. For example, an issue-to-PR workflow routes a request from Slack, GitHub, Linear, or Jira through triage, planning, implementation, and review, then returns a pull request to the original thread or issue. You choose the workflow and its human decision points.
What a factory does
Section titled “What a factory does”A factory can work through a backlog of tasks, fix defects reported in a support channel, or review incoming pull requests across several repositories.
The parts of a factory
Section titled “The parts of a factory”Work items
Section titled “Work items”A work item is one request the factory acts on. This can be an issue, a support thread, a pull request, or a scheduled job. It keeps its source context from intake to handoff, however many agents contribute along the way.
Foreman and factory agents
Section titled “Foreman and factory agents”The foreman is the agent that coordinates a factory’s work and communicates with you. See About factory agents for their roles, and Configuring factory agents to change their models, harnesses, and instructions.
Setup gives the foreman the same handle as the factory, so payments is the factory and @payments reaches its foreman from Slack or Linear. See Foreman name.
Stages and checkpoints
Section titled “Stages and checkpoints”Factory agents handle different stages of the software development lifecycle. The default agents cover triage, planning, implementation, and review.
The foreman can skip unnecessary stages or send work back for revisions. Spec approval is part of the foreman’s editable instructions, not a repository permission. The factory never merges on your behalf. Repository permissions and branch protection control approval and merge access. See How Warp Factories work.
Factory definition
Section titled “Factory definition”A factory’s repositories, agents, automations, runners, skills, and MCP servers are declared in definition files, either managed by Warp or stored in a GitHub repository your team owns. Changes to a GitHub-backed factory go through pull request review like any other code. See definitions as code.
Work sources
Section titled “Work sources”Connect Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Linear, and Jira through factory integrations. Results return to the thread, issue, or pull request where work began. Use custom webhooks or factory endpoints for other systems, and automations for scheduled work.
The Factory MCP lets a local coding agent send work to a factory, take it over locally, and hand it back.
Execution
Section titled “Execution”Every agent run in a factory is an ordinary cloud agent run on the Automation Platform. Runs execute on Warp-hosted compute by default; Enterprise teams can keep checkout and execution on their own infrastructure with managed self-hosting. See infrastructure and security for runners, inference, and credential boundaries.
Evaluate and improve factory work
Section titled “Evaluate and improve factory work”Use the factory dashboard to inspect PR activity, autonomy, cycle time, and cost. To evaluate and improve the work:
- Scorers - Classify runs against your criteria.
- Benchmarks - Compare configurations on the same tasks.
- Self-improvement - Propose changes for review.
See measure and improve for definitions and limitations.
Sizing a factory
Section titled “Sizing a factory”Group the repositories that ship together into one factory, and keep separate products in separate factories. For example:
- One factory for your main application
- One factory for your marketing site
- One factory for your data pipelines
Don’t split the same repositories across factories by team or task, such as frontend and platform. Add custom agents and skills to specialize instead.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”- Warp Factories quickstart - Create a factory and send its first work item.
- How Warp Factories work - The work-item lifecycle, stage by stage.
- About factory agents - Understand default agent roles
- Configuring factory agents - Choose models, harnesses, and instructions
- Multi-agent orchestration - Fan out ad-hoc parent and child agents outside a standing factory
- Definitions as code - The definition file format, with working examples in warp-factory-examples.
- Transitioning from Oz - Assess an existing web app, CLI, SDK, or API workflow.
- Get started with the Warp team - Get help choosing and setting up a workflow.