https://x.com/i/article/2118022722747842560
HumanLayer is joining Factory
I'm thrilled to announce today that HumanLayer is joining Factory to accelerate building autonomous, self-improving software for enterprises and developers. We have long admired Eno and Matan, and we are thrilled to be building the future of software factories together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbcSXsLLBX4
At HumanLayer, we’ve been power users of coding agents since early 2025, early on ideas like agent swarms and publishing the Research/Plan/Implement framework, one of the first viral “skill packs” in August 2025. Above everything else, we’ve always strived to cut through the hype with no-bs useful advice, along with tools that help you get to work on solving real problems. This goes all the way back to 12 factor agents and the early days of working on AI That Works with Vaibhav.
We have been regularly 6-9 months ahead of the meta on best practices for working with coding agents and software factories, especially for larger teams with hundreds or thousands of engineers. Our writing and speaking has earned millions of views and helped us to land HumanLayer in the hands of engineers working in sensitive and highly regulated industries, from small startups to publicly traded enterprises.
Being in the agentic engineering space, we’ve known Eno and Matan for a while, but when we started chatting more often, we couldn’t help but notice how deeply aligned we are on so many things, not least of which:
- Great engineers want flexible, composable tools, not monolithic, opinionated black-boxes.
- Larger teams with hundreds of engineers and hundreds of repos are not well-served by standard off-the-shelf coding agents and harnesses.
- Multiplayer and shift-left experiences for planning and collaborating on the work agents do
- The Enterprise market not only tolerates but REQUIRES a lab-neutral product family for orchestrating the work of models and agents, and the opportunity here is massive
Obviously, the decision to join forces with the Factory team vs. continuing to iterate on the HumanLayer vision was not an easy choice to make. We’re super mindful of and grateful to the incredible community that has sprung up around the…ehrmm…HumanLayer Cinematic Universe. We’re building with Factory because we truly believe this is the best way to get frontier workflows and tooling into as many hands as possible, AND to land some of our most advanced / forward-looking approaches in an incredibly high quality, polished, and mature harness + ecosystem.
To that point, we’ll be hard at work getting all the most loved HumanLayer features into Factory ASAP, including multiplayer tasks/workstreams, in-app collaboration on docs and plans, and live session diff streaming.
Going forward, we will be open sourcing HumanLayer and, as we get these features landed, inviting HumanLayer users to Factory. We’re excited to share what’s coming and get early feedback from the HumanLayer community on this work.
After spending a ton of time with the team and the Factory product, we’re SUPER confident that this is going to be a huge win for customers of both HumanLayer and Factory.
The current HumanLayer platform will remain up and running during a transition period of at least 30 days, where we will support users in any or all of: exporting their data, migrating to Factory, or self-hosting the HumanLayer open source. We’ll also be refunding paying customers for the last several months.
At Factory, one of the core operating principles is “earn the right” - which means before I come around trying to pitch you all on the cool things we’re building here, we owe it to all of you to give you a path to keep going with the HumanLayer OSS. We’re of course excited about the next iteration of multiplayer and collab that’s landing at Factory, and we look forward to earning the right to show you what’s next here.
To all our incredible customers, collaborators, investors, friends, family, and everyone who has supported us on this journey, a deep and gracious thank you. There’s too many individuals to thank everyone but I want to give a particular shout out to Grant Miller, Farooq Abbasi, the whole team at YC, Austin Alter, Luis and Mollie at Duxford Prior, our incredible legal team at Silicon Legal, and of course to Matan and Eno for the incredible team and product they’ve built so far.
We’re just getting started. More soon.
Dex & Kyle