Introducing PFactory: the Plan Factory
The autonomous-coding world collapsed planning into execution. PFactory pulls it back out — and puts a governance gate in front of every agent.
In 2026 the autonomous software engineers got very good at one thing: hand them a vague ask and they will plan and build it in a single loop. Devin, Factory’s droids, the GitHub Copilot coding agent — you give them an issue, they branch, code, test, and open a PR. The plan is implicit, internal, and gone the moment the code lands.
That optimizes for generation speed. But the industry’s own stated constraint for the year is the opposite: the gap between what agents can generate and what teams can confidently verify. The bottleneck isn’t typing code anymore — it’s trust.
PFactory is the missing front of the chain. It’s the third factory in the suite: AIFactory executes tasks, TFactory tests them, and PFactory plans them — as a deliberate, reviewable, governed step before any agent writes a line.
What it does
- Ingest a project plan — uploaded as
docx/pdf/markdown, or via the MCP control plane, the CLI, or a GitHub issue. - Enrich it with live context: internal wikis and Backstage (catalog, TechDocs, golden-path templates) for policy and best-practice, plus read-only introspection of your running Kubernetes / OpenShift / Azure / AWS / GCP — real load, quotas, network policies, resources — and Terraform and cloud best-practice MCP servers. We plan from the prompt and the running system.
- Decompose it into an epic and child issues. For software, that includes a task breakdown, a generated Testing Strategy, and a generated CI/CD pipeline.
- Review it through mandatory architecture / security / best-practices / feasibility gates — a hybrid of deterministic policy-as-code (Checkov, OPA, cloud-native policy) and LLM lenses — measured against templates that carry their own rules. Then one human approval.
- Emit governed GitHub epics + child issues — the durable, auditable source of truth — that AIFactory picks up and executes.
Why a separate factory
Because the plan should be the reviewed artifact, not a side-effect of execution. A governed epic with gate scores and a human sign-off is the compliance story the single-loop agents can’t tell. And because everything is pluggable — add MCP servers, skills, agents, and Backstage-compatible templates through a declarative registry, and let PFactory keep those templates current by proposing updates via pull request as the clouds change.
Plan. Govern. Hand off. That’s the Plan Factory.
PFactory is bootstrapping in the open — forked from the TFactory skeleton and rebranded, with the planning pipeline under construction. Follow along in the build epic.