Trying the Software Factory Pattern

One of the interesting challenges of the AI ecosystem in 2026 is that new, effective patterns emerge faster than I can adopt them. I'll find a handful, get back to work, and realize a month later that I'd missed four or five more. The adoption cycle for Imprint this year has been something like:

The most recent question for me has been figuring out how to adopt the software factory pattern. (After some light research, the specific AI-context origin of this term is slightly messy to attribute, but I think it might be Justin McCarthy in February 2026's Software Factories And The Agentic Moment .)

The software factory pattern is looping on a broad goal, and then relying on the harness to drive progress towards that goal. Our first pass at implementation is fairly basic: