Introducing Fabrica!
Today I'm launching Fabrica.
Fabrica ("FABB-rick-uh") is the Latin word for "factory" or "workshop", and it's a collection of open source tools and practices that will enable you (and me!) to assemble your own software factory.
This may sound strange for a launch post, but I'm launching Fabrica because I recently began building another company, Greenfield, a platform for running an AI-native small business. I'll share more about Greenfield later when the product is ready for launch. In the meantime, the question I'm focused on now is how can I build out my product with AI as effectively as possible?
The rise of software factories, sort of
The standard response to that today is to build or buy a software factory. AI gives us on-demand teammates who can scale as we give them directives, and it's changed the entire game of software engineering.
But best practices are very much still a work-in-progress. I've found posts on X and LinkedIn very insightful, but they tend to focus on an individual nugget of insight, and the job of assembling those insights into a holistic mental model on how to build a software factory is usually left as an exercise for the reader.
I've also learned a great deal from commercial software factory vendors like Warp, HumanLayer, and Factory. It's their job to come up with a holistic mental model, so their presentations and interviews are usually full of a whole collection of useful insights!
But every time I got to the "try it free" part of working with them, I found myself hesitating. The beating heart of any technology company is building software, and it seems incredibly risky to have your value-creation engine live entirely inside one vendor's platform, where that vendor owns the workflows, quality standards, and even your institutional knowledge.
There's the obvious risk of leverage: if they raise prices one day, will I have an out? But even more than that, it feels like building the software factory is my job. Maybe the end-to-end workflow they created works well for my exact product needs, but what if it doesn't? And don't I need to understand the full factory so that I can improve it myself, versus always calling the vendor with an idea?
The software factory you build yourself
So, I'd like to assemble my own software factory.
But that introduces another problem: it's hard, and it's time-consuming! I have customers waiting on me to ship software, not internal factory tooling, and I could easily spend all year building nothing but general-purpose software factory tooling.
I believe the best solution to all the above challenges is not finding the right vendor, but building the right community. If it's true that we all need to build our own software factories, then we become responsible for learning how and finding the right tools.
Learning, discovery, and improvement are activities best done in fellowship with others on the same journey. My vision for Fabrica is that it serves as the foundation for that community.
The Fabrica business model
Again, this is not exactly on point for a launch post, but...there isn't one.
I plan to monetize by doing a good job of building out Greenfield. I'm launching Fabrica to help me (and hopefully you!) do that more effectively.
As a result, the incentives for Fabrica are quite different than for a commercial software factory vendor:
- Pretty much all of Fabrica's tooling will be open source.
- I'll be using that tooling on a daily basis to build out my own product.
- I'll talk about and include third-party tools that work well for me.
- I'll share both the wins and losses; not everything is going to be a success story.
From my perspective, the worst case for Fabrica is that I've personally enhanced my own learnings about building software in the agentic era because I forced myself to organize, publish, and ultimately implement my thoughts.
But the best case is that others find these insights and tools useful and help improve them so that we all benefit. If I share an insight and someone points out there's a better way, that's a win all around.
How to join
The Fabrica community is simply people building their own software factories and comparing notes. Here's how to be part of it:
- Use the tools. Start with Code Rules, which gives your agents small, versioned rules to follow while they build and while they review. Then browse rules others have published on Rulemart.
- Give feedback. Open a GitHub issue on the tool you tried, like Code Rules or Rulemart. Share what you like, or what you didn't. The losses are just as useful as the wins.
- Reach out directly. I'd love to hear what you're working on or how you think we can build a stronger community. Send me a note or find me on LinkedIn.
Onward and upward
Agents may be the ones writing all the code these days, but that doesn't mean shipping production-grade software somehow got easy. It's just changed what we focus on.
Building software factories is hard! I hope you'll join me on the journey as I set out to prove that if I can do it well, so can you. Try a tool, tell me what broke, and let's figure this out together.