The 12-Factor Process

The Engineers Who Saw It First

“I rapidly went from 80% manual coding to 80% agent coding... This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades.”

— Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI

“When I spend time actually typing code with my own fingers, it feels like a waste of my time.”

— Obie Fernandez, CTO, author of “The Rails Way”

“The software development industry will be employing 10x fewer people within 3-5 years and the remaining 10% will produce 10x more value.”

— Evgeny Poberezkin, creator of Ajv (600M downloads/month)

The 12 Factors

The infrastructure patterns that define engineering in the AI era.

01 Preview Everything Every change is deployed to its own environment before merge
02 Shared Validation CI/CD, agent hooks, and pre-commit hooks all run the same pipelines
03 Democratize PRs Everyone on the team can create pull requests, not just engineers
04 Async Agents Coding agents run remote, in the cloud, in parallel
05 Codified Standards Design systems, code style, and architecture are written down and available to agents
06 Shared Agent Context Agent rules, plugins, and prompts are versioned and shared across the team
07 Agents in Every Conversation Agents available in meetings, Slack, email — ready to act
08 Unified Dev Environment Agents and developers work in the same coding environment
09 Show Don't Tell Put ideas in code, get them in front of customers, walk back rapidly if wrong
10 Data Accessible All system data accessible in very few API calls, available to all agents
11 Small Pods One domain expert + 1-2 engineers, no more
12 Complexity-Based Process Low-complexity changes merge automatically with no sign-off