Factory makes Environments generally available as sandboxes for cloud Droids

What an Environment is

Factory describes an Environment as a reusable definition of the sandbox that Droids run on. It is composed of the repositories, tools and dependencies the agents need. Factory builds each Environment into a portable image ahead of time, so the sandbox is ready before the Droid arrives.

The company says that running agents in the cloud lets teams parallelize projects across dozens of them and log off while they keep working. Environments are the first piece of what Factory calls its vision for the best cloud agent experience, which it is shipping this week.

The pitch is about onboarding. Factory compares an agent in a brand new environment to an engineer on their first day: it has to work out how to clone repositories, install toolchains, find undocumented configurations and complete a first successful build. According to Factory, agents spend time and tokens on that instead of meaningful work. Environments capture the onboarding work so every Droid can start contributing immediately.

Factory's Agent Readiness framework lists a documented, one-line setup command as a criterion for agent-native codebases, and the company says configuring an Environment should be as easy as onboarding a new hire.

Rebuilt every few hours and validated

Because engineering teams ship changes quickly, an environment that works today may lack core updates or dependencies tomorrow. Factory says it rebuilds Environments every few hours and validates each new build. Only successful builds are promoted, so Droids never start from a faulty environment.

This feeds into Automations, which run recurring tasks on a schedule or in response to Slack, GitHub and webhooks. When an Automation points at an Environment, each run starts on a fresh sandbox from the last validated build. Factory gives two examples: a Monday morning security audit that does not fail because a previous Droid Computer went down, and a webhook Automation that triages a CI failure within seconds instead of stopping to install updates. These runs act as the user or a service account and follow the same policy as any other Droid.

Fanning out work on Agent Readiness

Agent Readiness scores each repository out of five, where five means the repository is fully ready for agents to be maximally productive. Factory says most of its enterprise customers start at level two, while Missions, its long-running multi-agent framework, work best on repositories at level four or above.

Raising a repository's level used to be difficult, according to the company, because fixing the individual issues meant setting up several Droid Computers or keeping several local clones of the repository. With Environments, teams can fan out those fixes across multiple sandboxes.

Admin control and the week ahead

Environments are standardized and centrally managed by administrators, and Factory's Enterprise Controls still apply. Every cloud Droid operates under the same policies and uses the same set of tools and dependencies. Admins decide which hosts a Droid can reach, which shell commands it can run, which commands need approval or can never run, and which Connectors and Skills it can use. When a Droid tries a command the policy blocks, the harness stops it before it runs.

Factory says it will extend the fleet over the rest of the week with more sandboxes in more places. It names three directions: Droids on hardware a team already owns, Droids on sandboxes that never leave a team's own infrastructure, and Droids in the tools where engineering work begins. The company says that wherever a Droid lands, it enforces the same policy and leaves the same record.

To start, users open Settings → Environments in Factory and define their first Environment, then begin a Mission or Automation.