Manifesto
Trust is the bottleneck now
By Sandeep Panda and Syed Fazle Rahman
We’re Sandeep and Fazle. For over a decade we’ve built one thing: software for the people who build software. Hashnode grew into a blogging community used by millions of developers, backed by Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India’s Surge, and Accel. Bug0 came next: AI agents that test web apps end to end, with Passmark, our regression testing framework, open source at its core.
Two companies taught us the same lesson from opposite ends. At Hashnode, the backlog grew faster than any team we could responsibly hire; good ideas aged out in the queue. At Bug0 we live inside the other half of the problem every day: test suites that pass while software breaks. Shipping was never the truly hard part. Believing what shipped is.
Then coding agents got good enough for real backlogs. So we wired them into a production line for ourselves: isolated sandboxes, each repo’s own checks, browser QA recorded to video, one pull request per repo, a human merge at the end. We pointed it at Hashnode’s backlog and Bug0’s, and it shipped. When Ramp and Uber published what their internal agent factories were doing, we recognized the machinery. Ours just wasn’t tied to one company.
A few beliefs run through everything we build here.
01Evidence beats assertion
An agent claiming a change works is an assertion. A recording of the change working is evidence. Every FactoryKit pull request carries evidence, and the PR is the approval gate: nothing merges without a human.
02Factories are defined by inspection
Manufacturing settled this a century ago: output you don’t inspect is defect inventory. Much of our industry is currently building very fast lines with no QA station. We started from the QA station.
03You should own your factory
It runs on your infrastructure, with your keys if you want them, and the engagement is designed to end: our forward-deployed engineers hand the line to your team. We sell the factory, not a dependency on us.
04Agents are stations, not employees
We don’t name them, don’t give them faces, and don’t pretend they’re colleagues. Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build are interchangeable parts in a line whose quality comes from the stations around them.
What we won’t pretend: that any of this replaces engineers. It changes where their judgment goes. Specs in, review out. The teams that get the most from a factory are the ones with the strongest opinions about what to build next.
We run FactoryKit on FactoryKit, and on Hashnode and Bug0, every day. When you book a demo, the factory takes a task from your backlog and ships the pull request while you watch. That’s the pitch. We’d rather show you the line running than write another paragraph about it.
From the founders
Co-founder, Bug0 · Building FactoryKit
At Bug0, Sandeep architects Passmark, the open-source AI regression testing framework. He previously co-founded Hashnode and scaled it to millions of developers as its CTO. He wrote AngularJS: Novice to Ninja, co-wrote Jump Start HTML5, and thinks mostly about agentic testing and the infrastructure that makes AI-written code safe to ship.
Co-founder, Bug0 · Building FactoryKit
At Bug0, Fazle builds AI agents that test web apps end to end. He previously co-founded Hashnode and helped grow it into one of the web's largest developer communities. A front-end and UX engineer by training, he wrote Jump Start Bootstrap and Jump Start Foundation for SitePoint and has spent more than a decade building products for developers.
Watch the line run on your repos
A demo is a working session: your repos, a real task from your backlog, a finished pull request.