A note on this prototype
Why this workshop exists
Factory’s product is horizontal. It can do a hundred things, which means people stop after the first demo unless something shows them the next step on their own code. That makes education the constraint on growth, and Factory Academy is where that education should live.
What this is
This site is a working prototype of one Factory Academy workshop, built to show what the Academy could look like: a real scenario with stakes, a repository learners change, a scoreboard that measures every change, and controls learners are asked to break. It is also a template. The components, the lab anatomy, the data files and the authoring kit are designed so the next workshop costs a fraction of this one.
It is written for the audience the game plan calls the platform track: the staff and platform engineers who decide whether an organization can trust agents at all. In a regulated company that decision is made by someone like Ruth, and she does not read prompts as controls. The workshop is built around her question.
Who made it
A discussion draft from Michael Lynn, made as part of a conversation about Developer Relations at Factory. It is not an official Factory page. It uses Factory’s public visual language (Geist, the warm neutrals, orange as a signal) and deliberately carries no Factory logo, so nobody mistakes it for something Factory published.
What is real and what is not
- Real: every Droid command, flag, file path, config key, hook event and exit code, checked against docs.factory.ai on 29 September 2026. The reference fact sheet lives in the repository.
- Real: the companion repository, its tests, its flaky test, the scoreboard runner and checks, the change-control MCP server, and the finished harness.
- Illustrative: scoreboard numbers and session transcripts. They are the expected shape, marked on every page, and the instructor guide explains how to replace them with recorded runs after a pilot.
- Fictional: Larkspur Federal, its people and its incident. The shape of the problem is not.
How it maps to the Academy
One workshop is one row in a larger plan. The Academy blueprint lays out the tracks, the standard every workshop meets, and how field conversations turn into new content. The authoring kit is the practical half: the template, the components and the checklist for shipping the next one.
How to use it
Take the ideas to your own repository, measure what changes, and adapt the controls to what your system can break. If something is wrong or out of date, tell us. Droid ships often, and a workshop that silently drifts from the product is worse than none.