The Agent Factory Floor
The developer zone above, the agent floor below. Specs, guardrails, and approvals flow down; planning, coding, testing, and review agents run the line — with CI gates, a human review between build and deploy, and self-healing rollback on the night shift.
Software teams used to describe themselves with sports metaphors. The agentic SDLC earns an industrial one: a software factory, with two levels. Above, the developer zone — where humans define, constrain, and approve. Below, the agent factory floor — where specialist agents run the line.
click a station to inspect it
The developer zone
Three stations, all human:
- Define specs — intent and acceptance criteria; the contract the floor works against
- Design guardrails — security, permissions, budgets; the boundaries the line runs inside
- Review & approve — the gate between the build side and the deploy side
The geometry is the point: the human gate isn't a notification that fires while work proceeds — it's a station the work physically passes through. The deploy agent has no path that doesn't come through approval.
The floor
Each agent on the line holds a role, the way a hire would: the planning agent works as a tech lead, turning specs into sequenced tasks. The coding agent works as a senior engineer, implementing with docs inline. The testing agent is QA — running, repairing, re-running. The review agent audits like a security-minded staff engineer before any human spends attention. Then past the gate: the deploy agent ships, and the monitoring agent stands the SRE watch — including the 2 a.m. self-healing rollback that turns a midnight page into a morning report.
Platforms like Port ship this floor as a product: workflow nodes for each agent, role prompts attached ("acts as: senior product manager", "acts as: QA engineer"), a human-review gate wired between CI and CD, and a monitoring agent with rollback authority. The same shape appears in-house at teams running Claude Code or Codex agents inside CI — planning in one job, implementation in another, an approval environment between build and deploy.
The feedback spine
Two more stations close the loop. The feedback agent collects what the run learned — what broke, what got retried, what the humans corrected — and writes it back. And everything the floor learns lands in a shared store that the next run's planning agent reads first.
Which surfaces the floor's one structural weakness. Ten specialist agents means ten separate pictures of the system — ten chances to act on a stale service name, a moved API, a deprecated pattern. A factory where every station has its own blueprint doesn't produce ten small errors. It produces one incoherent machine.