Constitutions slash startups. Link in the description. Nikki, welcome back to the pod. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

We're going to understand what the bizarre phrase " software factory " means. I'm actually going to show you how I run mine. It's a lot easier than you think, and it's definitely model and harness agnostic, so you don't have to purchase. Some different product to have a software factory. It's going to be fun and it's going to be simple.

Okay, so you're going to explain what it is, why it matters, how it works, how to think about it. By the end of this, people are just going to be able to boot up their own software factory if they want, or if they think you know, this Rosemike guy, I don't, I don't like software factories. I don't like what he's saying. They can pass.

Hundred percent, hundred percent. With the term software factory, there's been a lot of like startups who've started. And you know I'm not here to knock anyone's hustle, but a software factory is completely harness and model agnostic. Meaning, it doesn't matter what model you use, it doesn't matter what harness you use. It should work, right? Because a software factory is more about someone's workflow, skills, and domain knowledge, and it's packed up. In specific skills that they use in their development process. Now, I want everyone to think like the last app that they built. You probably went on Codex, Cloud Code, Cursor, whatever it is, and you just typed, right? You said, "I want to build this," and it built it out for you. You saw it, and you didn't like it, and then you made some changes, right? And you saw the changes. Maybe you liked it. You deployed it to Vercel or to production, and you're good to go. Or you kept on iterating. That's the process. The whole point of a software factory is.

In each step of the development process, how can I best maximize the model's capability to get the greatest output? Right, and also how can I move fast? Right, because if we're using the term factory, there's some sort of structure and speed and conveyor belt nature that allows me to ship as quick as possible without losing quality. That's the long bloated Michael Schmidt's translate definition of software factory. I haven't lost anyone. Hopefully,

Greg, that was perfect. Okay, so understood. But like, why does that matter?

The reason why it matters is intelligence is continuing to increase. We have amazing models like GPT-6, Astro. A good software factory allows you to systemize and use these models in a very efficient way, versus just typing in and continuing to go back and forth. And I think it's better. I just show you how mine works. To give people an idea, now I'll give my skills are available for free, no charge, nothing like that. But I don't want you to blindly copy me. I would like for you to think about it, understand the process, and then apply it yourself. That being said, I have about five or six files that make my software factory. I have an agents .md file, and for everyone who might not be aware of what an agents .md file is, it's basically the.

This one document, this one Markdown file, that's injecteded into the system prompt. That's injected. Sorry, not in the system prompt. That's injecteded into the agent chat every time you communicate with an agent. So every time I say hi, if there's an agent .md file before the hi is sent, the agent .md file is sent. And what's cool about this file is I can sort of dictate how I want the agent to act. And we actually did a video not too long ago, Greg, where I talked about most people's agent .md file is useless because they. They were telling the agent a .md file what the code looked like and already information that's in the codebase that the agent can already know about. But if you look at mine, there's a simple workflow, and this workflow is something that's not native to the agent, so it explains clearly how to do it, and I'll walk you through every single step. The first step is isolate. There's a skill called new feature, and this is what it does. It says every new feature starts in a fresh Git work tree.

Branched from origin main, so agents can work in parallel without conflicts. Never build on main. And if you know when Michael is on Greg's channel, there's always diagrams. So we're about to draw. So with the first step, when I'm working on a project, and I tell it to work on a feature, the first thing it's going to do is isolate. And what this basically means is you can think of Greg and Mike's app. You can think of Greg's and Mike app like the journey being—you know—we started here, we started prompting here, and this is when we launched the production. We've got thousands of customers. The way most people work with their agents is at every single step of the journey, they're building a feature, and it's—it's a very linear process, right? One feature at a time, one feature at a time, one feature at a time.

And if you ever try to work like like with on multiple features at the same time, sometimes there's conflicts, there's issues. People have you know, oh my agent deleted this file, it overwrote this file. What this first step isolate does is the following: I'm going to show via diagram. So let's say Greg was like, I really don't like our landing page, and I'm telling Greg, you know, our our API calls can be faster. When Greg works on this feature. What the agent does using my agent.md is it's going to create a new branch, and you can think of a branch as a copy paste of the exact moment where the app is. So Greg is going to work on a new branch, a new work tree of the app. A work tree is basically a copy of the app. Like you can think of someone copying a block of text, pasting it in a new document, working on that document, and at some point going to merge it back in the original document. So.

So that's what Greg is doing. He has a new document working on that feature.