The Multi-Agent Architecture That Actually Ships — Luke Alvoeiro, Factory

Software engineering productivity is currently constrained by human attention rather than AI intelligence, as even advanced models require constant supervision. To overcome this, multi-agent systems like "Missions" leverage a structured architecture consisting of orchestrators for planning, workers for implementation, and adversarial validators for quality assurance. By utilizing a "validation contract" established before coding begins, these systems ensure correctness independently of the implementation, allowing for autonomous, multi-day task execution. This approach integrates five core agent strategies—delegation, creator-verifier, direct communication, negotiation, and broadcast—to maintain coherence. By assigning specialized models to specific roles and utilizing serial execution with targeted parallelization, teams can scale work streams significantly while maintaining cleaner, more robust codebases. This framework transforms agents from simple coding assistants into autonomous ecosystems capable of managing complex software development lifecycles.