factoryby squidbay squidbay/factory GitHub
Open source · MIT license

Stop hiring AI one chat at a time. Build a team you actually control.

A free template that turns the Claude desktop app into a team that remembers. Nothing ships until you approve it.

Use this template

One click. Your own private copy. · Or have us run it for you

One Claude subscription Your whole team One human One merge button
Run it from your pocket

Run your factory from anywhere.

One seat — Mobile Scout, your Dispatch on desktop & mobile — is the bridge between you and the whole team. It carries your orders to the seats and relays every seat's status back to your phone. Cowork leads the seats; you hold the one gate that matters.

  • Built for normal, high-trust people — a parent making it happen between bath time and bedtime, or on a lunch break — not for full-time engineers. Approachability from your phone is the whole promise.
  • The human is the only one who ever clicks Merge — not Mobile Scout, not Code, not the browser seat. Everything else is open season for the team; the merge button is yours alone.
  • Live nowConnect Code and wake Cowork, then dispatch from your phone — Code builds and Design draws, the Chrome inspector checks real pages, and your Dispatch carries the work and relays each seat's status back, while you hold the one merge gate.
Seeing is believing

A whole job, from your phone.

You send Mobile Scout, your Dispatch, a plain order. It carries the work to the team and brings back a pull request you can actually read. You tap merge. Nothing ships until you do.

  • Talk to it like a person. No commands, no dashboards.
  • The seats plan, build, and check each other while you get on with your day.
  • The green button is yours alone. Every merge is a choice you make.
Mobile ScoutDispatch · online Your phone
The seats

Your seats, your specialists, and you.

You. The only one who ever merges.

Every seat can propose. None can approve. The gate is yours alone, and it fits in your pocket.

The seat that never clocks out

Your other seats work in shifts. This one doesn’t.

The Agent

The desktop seats wake for a session, do one job and hand off — the journal remembers, so the next shift starts where the last one ended. The Agent is the one that stays up: deployed to your own site, answering your customers while the rest of the team sleeps. Think of the factory as your site’s WordPress, and the Agent as the plugin you drop into your chat box. It is the only seat that runs without you in the loop, so it gets its own limits — and it still cannot merge anything.

How it works

The assembly line. You hold the last station.

You brief your Coach Coach’s pull request Team Leader plans Engineer / Creative Director build Team Leader audits Pull request You merge Remembered

Nobody skips the line. Nobody merges their own work. And the factory journal writes every step into git, so tomorrow's shift starts where today's ended.

Mechanical rules

Plain, checkable rules that keep every seat in its lane.

Staged onboarding

The team stands itself up in order — the planner first, then the seats — and walks you in one stage at a time, so you're never building alone.

Mission packs

Ready-made first missions, so the team has real work from day one.

The merge gate

A pull request reads like a plain letter: what changed, why, and what to look at. Dispatch the work from the Claude desktop app, then review and merge at your desk, or from your phone when you're on the go.

Desk to pocket. Same green button.

The green button. That's the whole job.

The stack

The names that do the work, each doing what it does best.

Anthropic

The intelligence and the tooling

The Claude desktop app, Claude Code, Cowork, Claude Design, and skills. One subscription powers every seat.

GitHub

The memory and the gate

Every change is a pull request you approve, even from your phone. Every session writes to the journal before it ends, so months from now “why is it like this?” has an answer — and so does “prove it.”

Cloudflare

The runtime, when you build

If your team ships a website, it runs here. $5 flat.

$20 Claude Pro + $5 Cloudflare = a full AI team and a deployed website

On Claude Max? Same template, more headroom. See plans

Why it actually works

The thing we learned the hard way.

We spent months chasing the wrong race — a bigger model, a smarter single seat. What changed everything was smaller and stranger. Give one seat an ordinary working connection to do the job; give a second seat a read-only overseer view to check it; and let the two confirm or deny each other. Neither has to know anything — they look, and they check each other's looking.

Set up this way, an ordinary model runs circles around one brilliant seat working alone — because the factory's best output isn't either view. It's the difference between them. When the builder says “done” and the overseer says “not quite,” that gap is a truth neither could see alone. Grounding beats memory; two honest eyes beat one clever one. Read wide to see, write narrow to act, every change cross-checked and gated by you — that’s the mode worth growing into.

The God-View

Read-only omniscience

A chat remembers messily — it is cluttered with whatever scrolled by. A god-view report is clean: it reads the real thing and hands your team one grounded source of truth to check their work against.

three grounded reports — the layer above each seat’s own door

your code

GitHub, read-all

Every repo the factory touches, seen code-first — branches, pull requests, workflows — through a read-only token.

read-only

your running product

Cloudflare, read-all

The live system — workers, databases, the edge — seen through a read-only token.

read-only

your team of Claudes

Claude Desktop & Web, read-all

The setup your seats actually run on — permissions, skills, plugins, connections — captured from your own machine and redacted, so it can be checked against reality.

read-only

sees all · touches nothing · keys stay in the vault

A day in the factory

A typical day: eleven minutes of hands-on.

Over coffee

4 min

You tell Chat what you want, in your own words. Cowork turns it into a plan you can actually read. You say yes.

While you work

0 min

Code builds. Design draws. Cowork audits what they made. They settle their disagreements in writing, without you.

At lunch

3 min

Your phone shows a pull request: what changed, why, and what to check. You read it like a note from a careful colleague.

After dinner

4 min

You tap merge. The journal writes down what happened and why, so tomorrow's team wakes up already knowing.

A typical day puts your hands on it for eleven minutes. The factory runs the rest.

For the skeptical developer

Boring where it counts.

Built with Factory. SquidBay is built with this exact factory. The copy the template button gives you is the one we use ourselves. No hidden version, no enterprise edition.

No exposed services

Nothing listens, nothing is reachable from outside. It all runs inside apps you already trust.

No credential in any chat or file

Enforced in CI, not by good intentions.

Read broad, write narrow

Broad access is read-only. Write access is narrow, and every write is human-gated.

MIT, plain markdown

The whole factory is markdown you can read in an afternoon. No binaries, no magic.

Template-button architecture

One click on GitHub gives you your own private copy, on a free account.

One merge gate

A human approves every change. That's the architecture, not a setting.

Plain answers

Do I need to know how to code?

No. The seats write the code and explain it in plain words. Your job is to read a short summary and decide yes or no. If you can read an email and tap a button, you can run a factory.

What does it cost to run?

A paid Claude plan ($20 a month for Pro; Max plans work too) plus $5 flat for Cloudflare when you build something that ships. GitHub is free. That's the whole bill.

Is it safe to let AI touch my files?

The factory starts from the honest assumption: agents make mistakes. So no seat can change anything on its own. Every change is a pull request that waits for you, write access is narrow, broad access is read-only, and no credential ever appears in a chat or a file. Before a seat touches anything, it proves it can actually read and write your repo — so a half-connected setup fails loudly on the first move instead of going quiet for hours. You are the gate.

You run the factory. Not the other way around.

The line runs all day. You hold the gate.

Take your seat.

Stop building alone. Your subscription already contains a team. Three steps and the line is running.

  1. 01

    Get the Claude desktop app and any paid plan.

  2. 02

    Use the template. The button on GitHub gives you your own private copy.

  3. 03

    Attach it to Claude Code and just start typing.

Use this template Fully managed → Built by Claude · Directed by humans · Runs forever