Francesca LaBianca

@FactoryAI and @PaloAltoNtwks are partnering to bring security against prompt-injection directly into the Factory platform. Inspect prompts, model responses, and tool calls for injection risks with Droid powered by Prisma AIRS. It's been a privilege working with the PANW team on this.

@leerob Congrats Lee!

Life update... daughter #2 has arrived 🌸🌹

Zero humans. Forty features. Nine hours. Jensen Huang says AGI is here. I agree, and I have the screenshots to prove it. Yeah, I know. You've read this headline forty times this week. Scroll past, nobody would blame you. But I've been quietly using something since February that most people haven't caught up to yet...it's not Opus 5. The screenshots are a system that just finished a full architecture refactor of a production codebase. It found duplication I'd been living with for months and left the codebase meaningfully better than when it started. The system is Factory AI's Droid, specifically a feature called Missions. I paddle outrigger canoe in Hawaii. Our club needed an app. Not a vibe slop app...a real app. Authentication, group management, crew assignments with rotation logic so the same person isn't always stuck in seat 6, real-time chat, weather integration that warns you when wind is above 15 mph, notifications, admin controls. The kind of thing that would've cost six figures to build a few years ago. So I described what I wanted to Droid, and then I sat there watching it. It didn't just start writing code. It started asking me questions. Like, good questions. Clarifying questions about edge cases I hadn't even thought of. Then it broke the whole project into 14 milestones and 76 features. And before it wrote a single line of code, it created these things called validation contracts, basically testable assertions based on the spec so it knows what "done" actually looks like. I'm sitting there like...wait, it's planning the way I would plan? Then it started building. But here's the part that got me. When a milestone finished, separate agents came in and tested everything from the user's perspective. NOT UNIT TESTS! These agents actually opened a browser in the background and clicked through the app the way a real person would. When something failed, it didn't just retry the same thing. It went back and re-steered the entire plan. I've never seen an AI system do that successfully for many hours. I know what you're thinking, how many tokens did this cost??!? Is it burning tokens the entire time? The answer has a lot more detail than just running a Ralph loop on steroids. So I flew to San Francisco and sat with the Factory AI team to understand how this actually works under the hood. The orchestrator never writes code, it only delegates. Workers get cleared context between tasks so they don't hallucinate from stale state. And get this, the system isn't even tied to one model. You can run Claude as the orchestrator and GPT-5 as the worker. Their longest mission? Sixteen days. Can you imagine? I've been building with AI live since August 2024. I've had fifty Claude windows open (well...you know what I mean), Codex running in parallel, the whole circus. You know the feeling. This is the first time I've felt like the system was genuinely thinking through a problem the way a senior engineer would scope a project before writing a single line of code. Jensen told Lex Fridman that AGI means AI that can build a billion-dollar company. I don't know about a billion dollars, but it built my canoe club a production app while I went to make coffee. That's close enough for me.

Get @FactoryAI free for an entire year with your Lenny’s Newsletter subscription lennysproductpass.com

Missions are now available to all Factory users. Long-running agents designed to automate large software tasks like building applications from scratch, migrations, and AI research. Let us know what you build!

@jackhcable @corridor @felicis 🚀🚀🚀

Today we're announcing @Corridor's $25M Series A led by @Felicis. More code will be written this year than ever before. At Corridor, securing AI coding at the source, enabling companies to their development without security being a blocker. 🧵

@zhangjintao9020 @LucasVogel_dev @nvidia @embirico @thsottiaux Yes it is now!

I have been switching between Codex, Claude code, and cursor for a lot of my work at @nvidia. They all have their own tradeoffs, but using GPT-5.3-Codex on Codex CLI today has been insane and it might become my go to. Kudos to the team for shipping this @embirico @thsottiaux

@LucasVogel_dev @nvidia @embirico @thsottiaux It's available to all Nvidia employees with your company email! app.factory.ai

@francesca_lab @nvidia @embirico @thsottiaux Don’t have to tell me twice 👀👀

@flappyairplanes Congrats team!!

Announcing Flapping Airplanes! We’ve raised $180M from GV, Sequoia, and Index to assemble a new guard in AI: one that imagines a world where models can think at human level without ingesting half the internet.

All teams should be using software development agents for knowledge work. Give Droid a try for free with your Lenny's newsletter sub. Pleasure to work on this with you @lennysan!

@kaiskhimji @blockitAI @sequoia Congrats Kais and team!

BIG NEWS: Today we are launching @blockitAI -- the first AI scheduling agent that actually understands your time. After spending my career as a partner at @sequoia, I stepped back to build this. Why? Because I believe the calendar is the last untouched social network, and it can only now be unlocked through AI. Our scheduling agent can handle any degree of complexity and has spread purely through virality to date. Blockit now works for 200+ companies and has coordinated 100,000+ meetings — all with zero humans in the loop. We're excited to emerge from stealth and announce our $5M raise from @sequoia led by Pat Grady (@gradypb) with participation from @haystackvc, @adjacent, Original, and NPV, i.e. Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of Linkedin. Come for the agent, stay for the network — get started free today at blockit.com

Actively assess your codebase and ship fixes instantly to improve performance across all agents, not just Droid. Run /readiness-report

@charliecurnin Congrats Charlie! Excited for you

at the end of 2021, i got unbelievably lucky. a zoom call i took from berlin during my last year of school — which i thought might lead to joining a Sequoia portfolio company as an engineer — turned into a chance to join the Sequoia team as an intern. and then… for four years as an investor. at Sequoia, i've had the privilege to learn from A++ founders like Winston & Gabe at Harvey, Alfred & Florian at Listen Labs and Anish, Ahmed, Raj & Raaz at Traversal. and too many A++ investors to name, especially Konstantine, Shaun and Alfred who brought me into the firm. thank you! we’re in the midst of a once-in-a-generation time to build transformational products. since last year, i haven’t been able to stop hacking on things in my free time, and imagining what’d happen if i went all in. it’s bittersweet to leave, but i’m beyond grateful to Sequoia for giving me the skills to (hopefully) create something meaningful. now i’m going all in! thanks to my amazing colleagues, the founders and LPs we work with, and everyone else who’s made the last four years so special!

Calling all Zed fans

Compaction is all you need

@GuptaRK22 Congrats Ravi!

Venture investing is a remarkable job. You get to hear visions for the future from founders. Then you get to help in a small way while they go and will that vision into existence with resilience, grace, and grit. Being at Sequoia has given me the chance to work with some of the best founders in the world. Bret and Clay. Max, Jeff, Marcelo, and Daniele. Eric and Karim. Saji and Ashu. Job and Marcelo. Anil and Sunil. George. So many others. They are awe-inducing and inspiring. So inspiring that I've decided to join them and start my own company. I miss building and leading. I want to compete on the field during the AI wave. I'll share more soon, but for the moment, I will say that AI is the most transformative technology of our lifetimes. The opportunity for companies who embrace it thoughtfully and aggressively is unbounded. I love Sequoia and have made lifelong friends here. I have been lucky to learn from the very best. And I will still be on the team. Sequoia will be a founding investor in the new company and I will remain a Partner. I am so excited to get back on the field. LFG.

@EnoReyes Skills are the new macros

Unexpected side effect of agents taking over finance will be everyone converting to MacBooks

@steipete @FactoryAI Means a lot!

Kudos to @FactoryAI for doing some really interesting work re compactation that seems to be better than both Anthropic and OpenAI’s solutions. (and for proving me wrong)

Droid is the highest-performing agent for full-stack NextJS development. This outperforms popular tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex CLI. The official NextJS benchmark tests agents against real-world engineering tasks, from migrating legacy Pages Router apps to building and optimizing complex features in modern web stacks. Droid achieves state-of-the-art results across all frontier models.