Built in days, not months, with one person directing.

01The leak

The person approving was the bottleneck.

Before the factory we shipped about 150,000 lines of code a month. Even in September, a person still approved 70% of changes, and the pipeline waited on them.

02The fix

Checks first, people for what matters.

A handful of rules, enforced by the tooling rather than written in a document.

• Checks first automatic tests and checks run on every change, however small.
• Approval by risk only changes that are hard to undo wait for one person.
• Nothing clears its own work the agent that wrote a change can never be the one that clears it.

03Now

Over 2 million lines in October.

In October the factory shipped 1,298 changes and over 2 million lines of code. Over the 30 days to 6 November, 91% were cleared by the automatic checks alone. The same discipline sits behind every AI and software build we do for clients.

From our own repositories: code lines changed (code only, no generated files, lockfiles, data or docs) and merged changes by month, March to October 2026.