What engineering leaders and their teams report about Factory, with every finding tied to its evidence.
Read the findingsPractitioner sentiment, all practitioners
+22 Positive from 54 sources that take a side
How this figure is madeFrom 50 authors in 54 discussions. Use a task pilot to measure accepted work and review time.
Feb 2025 to Oct 2026.
85 sources from practitioners, by month and sentiment.
Hacker News and YouTube lean positive, while Reddit leans negative, with 12 of 25 posts negative. GILD scores 25 GitHub issues as mixed, since they report bugs or request features, and the other 2 as positive.
Positive, mixed and negative sources
The score counts them as 24 positive, 13 mixed and 13 negative votes, one per author. See How the numbers work.
See the evidenceBelow: 4 praise themes, 4 concerns, 2 close to agreement and 2 disagreements.
Counted for All practitioners, from 85 sources. Change group
Every capability practitioners describe positively, ranked by how many sources say so. Open one to read who said it.
Counted for All practitioners.
Positive, 15
Positive
mgambati, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: Claude Opus 4.8Hacker News comment
Uses GPT 5.3 as the worker model inside Droid and says it does a great job there despite its robotic writing.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
hboon, Independent developer
Comment on: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed againHacker News comment
Switched to Droid with Opus on Claude Max many months ago and it was the author's favorite combo, but had to stop because "they don't like us proxying requests anymore".
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
theturtletalks, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAIHacker News comment
Runs GPT-5.2, Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 in Droid CLI; Gemini loops and breaks tool calls, sometimes corrupting a thread so it cannot be rewound to another model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Positive
jared0x90, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding CapabilityHacker News comment
Asks why "nobody seems to be trying it" with Factory's Droid in the thread, and says Droid BYOK with GLM4.7 "seems like a really cost effective backup" in the little they have experimented with it.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Positive
Danny Aziz, General manager of Spiral at Every
Vibe Check: I Canceled Two AI Max Plans for Factory's Coding Agent DroidNewsletter, Every
After a few months on Droid, Danny Aziz canceled their Claude and ChatGPT Max plans: one tool switches between Anthropic and OpenAI models, and it fixed a migration Claude Code kept failing.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Positive
Jeremy Grove, Developer and author of MediaDataFusion guides
Why I Like Factory AI Droid: Flexibility, BYOK, CLI + IDE + CloudVideo, YouTube
Jeremy Grove likes Droid for its flexibility, configuring their own OpenAI, Anthropic, and Z.AI keys and using it from the CLI, Cursor, VS Code, and cloud sync.
"Droid gives choice. Hello, I'm Jeremy Grove, founder of Media Data Fusion. In this video, I will be covering Factory AI Droid, a CLI, IDE, and cloud platform that gives you the flexibility to use their API keys, yours, or mix and match. I'll cover…"
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
FindingSerendipity_1, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Factory Droid vs Cursor Usage QuotaReddit post
A new subscriber finds the Droid Core pool of open models useful and generous on top of the standard usage pool.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Mixed
Robin Min, Independent developer and author of Surfing
Droid CLI Review: Hands-On Experience After Free TrialPersonal blog post, Surfing (surfing.salty.vip)
After several days on the free trial, praises the Droid CLI's concise, clean TUI and model agnosticism, but calls its permission management weak, suspecting every programmer could find 101 ways around its string-array checks. Has recently used Claude Code with Claude Code Router across models.
Practitioner account; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
mlcarl, GitHub user running Droid Missions, self-described
ProposeMission tool crashes with "undefined is not an object (evaluating 'H.length')" in droid 0.150.1GitHub issue
After a 19-hour Mission completed successfully, every new Mission failed because ProposeMission crashed in droid 0.150.1 with a BYOK GLM model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Positive
ahmadyan, Builder of a multi-agent IDE (Agentastic.dev)
Comment on: DeepClaude - Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 ProHacker News comment
Reports that the same Opus model works better inside third-party harnesses such as Factory Droid or Amp than in Claude Code, which ahmadyan sees as tuned for cost.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
sebazzz, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?Hacker News comment
Likes that Droid lets one agent write the spec and another implement it, which counters GPT rewriting code to satisfy a bad specification.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Positive
Apprehensive_Half_68, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid Vs. CC with GLM 4.7 comparisonReddit post
Comparing Droid and Claude Code on GLM-4.7, Apprehensive_Half_68 finds GLM a beast inside Droid.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
mediumbrownfox, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Is there a YOLO mode similar to claude code?Reddit post
mediumbrownfox loves Droid with Gemini 3 but must approve plans every 30 seconds even on Auto (High), and wants a sandboxed mode to let it run alone.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Positive
Unlucky_Draft_3468, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
How to Enable Deep Reasoning (High) When Using Custom ChatGPT Models?Reddit post
A self-described big fan moved from the Codex CLI to Droid on an OpenAI key and finds it a much better experience, though unsure how to set reasoning depth.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
AICodeKing, AI coding tool reviewer
Droid CLI + GLM-4.6 + FREE 4.5 Sonnet,GPT-5 : Is it really the NEXT CLAUDE CODE?Video, YouTube (AICodeKing)
AICodeKing tested Droid with Sonnet 4.5 on four projects. Three failed, and the fourth missed a dependency. GLM-4.6 did better. AICodeKing found Factory's agent claims did not match those results.
"…this correctly either. It did get the bars implemented, but the step counter doesn't work. it almost never oneshots anything. Then I thought maybe it was focused more on large repos. So I tried my open code repo question and it failed…"
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits
Mixed or negative, 7
Mixed
hrmesquita, GitHub user on the Factory desktop app with BYOK models
Desktop 0.184.0: new sessions reset custom-model default to auto (custom models missing from picker)GitHub issue
After updating to Desktop 0.184.0, the author's 14 local custom models briefly show in the model picker and then disappear, and new sessions start on auto, overriding the custom default. It worked on 0.183.2.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Mixed
marovole, GitHub user running Droid with a BYOK OpenAI-compatible model
With a BYOK OpenAI-compatible model, parallel tool calls returning images corrupt the session history so every later turn fails.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
OliverGeorge8, GitHub user running custom droids from Spec Mode
Custom droid glm-5.2 pin intermittently falls back to GPT-5.6 SolGitHub issue
A custom droid pinned to Droid Core glm-5.2 silently ran on the pricier GPT-5.6 Sol parent model during parallel Spec Mode tasks.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
hdot123, GitHub user on a Factory team plan, self-described
Bug: BYOK session fails with empty response, code-server SIGABRT on new sessionGitHub issue
A failing BYOK GLM-5.2 proxy gave only an opaque empty-response error and then left the CLI unable to start new sessions until processes were killed.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Negative
miraserver, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: Factory Raises US$50M Series BHacker News comment
Alleges Droid was serving older models than the ones selected in settings, based on asking the model to identify itself.
not counted, repeats a stronger account
Negative
jrhabana, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
How to fix "factoryd appears to be unavailable.."Reddit post
Workers keep failing with a factoryd-unavailable error on several BYOK providers, and restarting and resuming rarely works.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Negative
Warm_Sandwich3769, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
New updates are forcing me to quitReddit post
A paying user who brought 15 developer friends to Droid says recent updates broke the interface, image attachments for a custom GLM model, and JSON handling, with no changelog or rollback.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Adoption and upkeep
Counted for All practitioners.
Positive
dimbage, GitHub user
couldn't run on windowsGitHub issue
A Factory example would not run on Windows; Droid diagnosed the MIME-type bug in the server and fixed most of it.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Positive
travbarb, Reddit user in r/ClaudeCode
droid + sonnet 4.5Reddit post
Says the Droid CLI with Sonnet 4.5 feels like a completely different thing from Claude Code: every problem Claude Code fell to pieces on, Droid is basically one-shotting. Still in the free token window after many hours, with the understanding that it is "expensive maybe" from there.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Positive
Ian Nuttall, Independent developer
Adding a new feature to a project with Factory CLIVideo, YouTube
Ian Nuttall uses the new Factory CLI to plan and then build a daily and hourly heatmap tracker in an existing open-source project.
"…proposing keeps the existing database as it is. We already have a time stamp so we know the hour of the day when the page event was triggered. So we can use the existing schema. It's proposing a new endpoint API/activity heatmap…"
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Positive
AI LABS, AI development tutorial channel
These Factory AI Droids Built My App in 10 Minutes! (Rust + TypeScript!)Video, YouTube (AI LABS)
The channel used Factory's specialist droids to build a Rust and TypeScript desktop app on a local machine, and tested whether the droids work like a dev team.
"…everything is now fully set up, we can go ahead and officially begin. After we confirm that the setup is complete, it tells us we're going to build an app together using Tori, which is a framework that uses Rust and TypeScript."
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
data_delaurier, Hacker News commenter
Comment on: Understanding DroidsHacker News comment
Calls Factory the best coding agent framework they have tried; sends plans to Code Droid, then Reliability, Knowledge and Product Droids, which work until done with little intervention.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
Danny Aziz, General manager of Spiral at Every
Vibe Check: I Canceled Two AI Max Plans for Factory's Coding Agent DroidNewsletter, Every
After a few months on Droid, Danny Aziz canceled their Claude and ChatGPT Max plans: one tool switches between Anthropic and OpenAI models, and it fixed a migration Claude Code kept failing.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Positive
kirkmarple, Founder who built the Zine app on their own company platform (Graphlit)
Show HN: I built a SaaS in 8 weeks, solo, using our own AI platformHacker News story
Shipped an MVP in 8 weeks solo, with all coding assisted by Claude Code and Factory Droid, and says AI coding tools made it shockingly fast.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Mixed
Oliver, Author of a Substack newsletter on AI tools (aileverage.substack.com)
ChatGPT Codex vs FactoryNewsletter, aileverage.substack.com
Testing Codex and Factory on the same two tasks, Oliver found Factory's custom droids strong at planning and repo comprehension, but its system prompts can overwrite messages in longer chats and GitHub repo linking doesn't always work. Codex felt steadier building the speech-to-text app.
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability, Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
Dan McAteer, Developer and YouTube creator
Exploring Factory Droids: Your Ultimate AI Coding AgentsVideo, YouTube (Attention Heads by Dan McAteer)
After a month of access Dan McAteer walks through Code, Knowledge, and Reliability droids, multi-repository context, and running Pytest locally through Factory Bridge.
"…connect to GitHub. You can search through the code memory. So you can see here what we don't have is the terminal turned on. And that's because we're not connected at the moment to my local machine using factory bridge. So factory…"
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; not counted, tied to the vendor
Counted for All practitioners.
Positive, 9
Positive
whoisronak, GitHub user planning a product on the Droid SDK
Is there a timeline on the stable release?GitHub issue
A big fan of Factory's harness in the CLI asks for an approximate timeline for the SDK's stable release, wanting to use it to power a new product.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
Robin Min, Independent developer and author of Surfing
Droid CLI Review: Hands-On Experience After Free TrialPersonal blog post, Surfing (surfing.salty.vip)
After several days on the free trial, praises the Droid CLI's concise, clean TUI and model agnosticism, but calls its permission management weak, suspecting every programmer could find 101 ways around its string-array checks. Has recently used Claude Code with Claude Code Router across models.
Practitioner account; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
Apprehensive_Half_68, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Damn impressed with Droid CLIReddit post
Six parallel Droid agents finished work Apprehensive_Half_68 estimated at several days in a few hours; Spec Mode, session management, and speed impressed, and Droid Shield flagged false secrets.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
bbor, Hacker News commenter
Comment on: Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloudHacker News comment
Recommends Droid for its competent, corporate engineering attitude, but says Missions overdo mandatory verification and run sequentially without swarms.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
sebazzz, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?Hacker News comment
Likes that Droid lets one agent write the spec and another implement it, which counters GPT rewriting code to satisfy a bad specification.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Positive
StrixGGUY, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
First impressionsReddit post
After setting up custom droids, MCP, and AGENTS.md on an 80,000-line Rust backend, StrixGGUY was convinced and plans to move from Claude Code Max to Droid Max.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Operational control
Positive
Jeremy Grove, Developer and author of MediaDataFusion guides
Why I Like Factory AI Droid: Flexibility, BYOK, CLI + IDE + CloudVideo, YouTube
Jeremy Grove likes Droid for its flexibility, configuring their own OpenAI, Anthropic, and Z.AI keys and using it from the CLI, Cursor, VS Code, and cloud sync.
"Droid gives choice. Hello, I'm Jeremy Grove, founder of Media Data Fusion. In this video, I will be covering Factory AI Droid, a CLI, IDE, and cloud platform that gives you the flexibility to use their API keys, yours, or mix and match. I'll cover…"
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
AICodeKing, AI coding tool reviewer
Droid CLI + GLM-4.6 + FREE 4.5 Sonnet,GPT-5 : Is it really the NEXT CLAUDE CODE?Video, YouTube (AICodeKing)
AICodeKing tested Droid with Sonnet 4.5 on four projects. Three failed, and the fourth missed a dependency. GLM-4.6 did better. AICodeKing found Factory's agent claims did not match those results.
"…this correctly either. It did get the bars implemented, but the step counter doesn't work. it almost never oneshots anything. Then I thought maybe it was focused more on large repos. So I tried my open code repo question and it failed…"
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits
Positive
Dan McAteer, Developer and YouTube creator
Exploring Factory Droids: Your Ultimate AI Coding AgentsVideo, YouTube (Attention Heads by Dan McAteer)
After a month of access Dan McAteer walks through Code, Knowledge, and Reliability droids, multi-repository context, and running Pytest locally through Factory Bridge.
"…connect to GitHub. You can search through the code memory. So you can see here what we don't have is the terminal turned on. And that's because we're not connected at the moment to my local machine using factory bridge. So factory…"
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; not counted, tied to the vendor
Mixed or negative, 12
Mixed
LouisDeconinck, GitHub user connecting Droid to T3 Code over ACP
ACP session/set_config_option returns {} instead of required configOptionsGitHub issue
Droid 0.234.0 returned an invalid ACP config response, making it unusable in T3 Code for every model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
brendandebeasi, GitHub user who uses both Claude Code and Droid
Asks for Claude Code style mouse text selection in the Droid TUI, since copying on-screen text today means repairing wraps by hand.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
mrwogu, GitHub user building on the Droid Python SDK
Python SDK 0.1.2 is behind the current Droid JSON-RPC surfaceGitHub issue
The Python SDK lags the Droid CLI and TypeScript SDK, so tool disabling, structured output and context methods need private APIs.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Negative
sunoval2017, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid CLI is unbearable slowReddit post
Typing in the Droid CLI lags badly; sunoval2017 measured Droid using a full CPU core while idle, about 17 times Claude Code's use.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Negative
virgilp, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5Hacker News comment
Now uses Codex, and recalls that trying factory.ai about six months earlier left virgilp convinced chat-first coding interfaces would never work.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
addidotlol, GitHub user of Droid in Zed
Opening a new thread while another is responding causes Droid to block new threadsGitHub issue
In Zed, opening a new Droid thread while another streams locks new threads; the Zed Agent and OpenCode did not show the bug.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Negative
vargalas, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
It's the worst onboarding experience everReddit post
The install command failed on a self-signed certificate, the support link did not work, and sales could not be contacted, so vargalas gave up on Droid.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Negative
Warm_Sandwich3769, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
New updates are forcing me to quitReddit post
A paying user who brought 15 developer friends to Droid says recent updates broke the interface, image attachments for a custom GLM model, and JSON handling, with no changelog or rollback.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
EmbarrassedBird2833, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Feedback for MCPReddit post
EmbarrassedBird2833 likes the Droid CLI but failed three times to connect Chrome and Supabase MCP servers, through Factory Bridge, the CLI, and the config file.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
Oliver, Author of a Substack newsletter on AI tools (aileverage.substack.com)
ChatGPT Codex vs FactoryNewsletter, aileverage.substack.com
Testing Codex and Factory on the same two tasks, Oliver found Factory's custom droids strong at planning and repo comprehension, but its system prompts can overwrite messages in longer chats and GitHub repo linking doesn't always work. Codex felt steadier building the speech-to-text app.
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability, Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
Kieran Klaassen, general manager of Cora at Every
Transcript: 'How Two Engineers Ship Like a Team of 15 With AI Agents'Podcast episode transcript, AI & I (Every)
Klaassen reports that the team has Factory as well and rates it a B, "maybe a little bit below Codex and Devin": better than any others at certain things, for enterprisey people, good at multi-repo work, a little hard to use across web and local, and not Klaassen's thing.
"Factory with certain things is better than any others, but it's not my style. Factory is for more enterprisey people that are very nerdy and want absolute bangers of code and it's actually good, multi-repo stuff like that."
Practitioner account, name and role on their organization's own page; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Mixed
heretiqal, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid is really trying hard to encourage me to cancelReddit post
Mid-refactor, Droid opened a blank session with no memory of the work. heretiqal could not find the old session but still rates Droid above Cursor and Warp.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Counted for All practitioners.
Positive, 7
Positive
rmaxdev, Hacker News commenter
Comment on: GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the priceHacker News comment
Runs a Hermes orchestrator on DeepSeek Flash that delegates heavy development work to Codex and Droid harnesses on subscriptions.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Mixed
ahmadyan, Builder of a multi-agent IDE (Agentastic.dev)
Comment on: Show HN: Agentastic.dev is Ghostty and Git worktrees = multi-agent CC/Codex IDEHacker News comment
For hard tasks, the commenter sends the same prompt to Claude Code, Codex, Droid and their own agent. They review the outputs and pick the best, shifting effort to verification.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Positive
Apprehensive_Half_68, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Damn impressed with Droid CLIReddit post
Six parallel Droid agents finished work Apprehensive_Half_68 estimated at several days in a few hours; Spec Mode, session management, and speed impressed, and Droid Shield flagged false secrets.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Positive
Sid Bharath, Independent writer on AI agents (hands-on Droid tutorial)
Factory Droid Tutorial: Missions, Skills, and AgentsPersonal blog post, sidbharath.com
Bharath finds Factory most interesting when the work is larger than a code edit, such as a migration with a planner, several workers, validation and a review trail. Warns that Missions' coordination has a cost: more outputs to review and more tokens spent rediscovering the same context.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
James Garrett, backend developer at Tilt
Embracing AI at Tilt: Beyond Code GenerationCompany engineering blog post, Tilt blog
Tilt's engineering team was a beta partner for Factory and its Review Droid. Engineers use it for on-call investigation and QA impact analysis, and a droid.yaml file runs custom checks on every pull request that catch small bugs a human reviewer would miss.
"These types of bugs are easy to miss with a human eye, but the review droid does a fantastic job."
Practitioner account, name and role on their organization's own page; ran the rollout; not counted, tied to the vendor
Positive
mgambati, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: Claude Opus 4.8Hacker News comment
Uses GPT 5.3 as the worker model inside Droid and says it does a great job there despite its robotic writing.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
Danny Aziz, General manager of Spiral at Every
Vibe Check: I Canceled Two AI Max Plans for Factory's Coding Agent DroidNewsletter, Every
After a few months on Droid, Danny Aziz canceled their Claude and ChatGPT Max plans: one tool switches between Anthropic and OpenAI models, and it fixed a migration Claude Code kept failing.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Mixed or negative, 13
Mixed
bbor, Hacker News commenter
Comment on: Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloudHacker News comment
Recommends Droid for its competent, corporate engineering attitude, but says Missions overdo mandatory verification and run sequentially without swarms.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Mixed
thedevtoni, GitHub user running droid-action automated PR review on a private repository
droid-action two-pass review with glm-5.3 posted the same review four times and clipped comment bodies, forcing a cleanup step in their workflow.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; ran the rollout; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Mixed
alanxchen85, GitHub user with a registered Droid Computer
Sessions created in the desktop app on a registered Droid Computer never appear on web or mobile, contrary to the documented cross-device behavior.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
snguyen-cars, GitHub user delegating to custom droids
Custom droids receive zero MCP tools despite valid configurationGitHub issue
Custom droid subagents received no MCP tools even though the parent session could call them, so MCP-backed custom droids did not work.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
Roderick-Clemente, GitHub user systematically testing droid exec, self-described
droid exec --mission performs no work and reports success (num_turns 0, zero tokens, exit 0)GitHub issue
droid exec with --mission did no work yet reported success with zero turns, tokens and credits, while the same task without --mission edited the file.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
waxyslave, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Why do GPT coding models have such a fetish for dispatching sub-agents?Reddit post
GPT models in Droid keep spawning sub-agents that block the main thread and burn usage, even though their AGENTS.md forbids them unless asked.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Operational control
Mixed
mlcarl, GitHub user running Droid Missions, self-described
ProposeMission tool crashes with "undefined is not an object (evaluating 'H.length')" in droid 0.150.1GitHub issue
After a 19-hour Mission completed successfully, every new Mission failed because ProposeMission crashed in droid 0.150.1 with a BYOK GLM model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Mixed
glmn, GitHub user building a host around interactive Droid sessions
permission_prompt Notification hook has no tool name or input ("needs permission to execute 1 tool(s)")GitHub issue
Droid permission notifications omit the tool and command, so with several sessions open users cannot see which approval is risky without switching terminals.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
joshwilhelmi, GitHub user running droid exec under a sandbox
In sandboxes without ps, every Droid Execute call is SIGKILLed within milliseconds because its supervisor treats a failed probe as owner death.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
OliverGeorge8, GitHub user running custom droids from Spec Mode
Custom droid glm-5.2 pin intermittently falls back to GPT-5.6 SolGitHub issue
A custom droid pinned to Droid Core glm-5.2 silently ran on the pricier GPT-5.6 Sol parent model during parallel Spec Mode tasks.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Negative
jm3823, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid no longer better than cc or codexReddit post
jm3823 says Droid fell behind Claude Code and Codex after Factory's focus on the app and Droid Core, and that Missions now take two days to accomplish nothing.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Negative
Academic-Assignment2, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Subagent FailuresReddit post
With BYOK models only, the commenter's subagents fail consistently on Linux and Windows. They found few fixes from other users.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
rjmurillo, GitHub user in a security-constrained organization
Request: Use SHA-pinned action references for security-constrained repositoriesGitHub issue
Cannot adopt droid-action for automated PR reviews because it uses unpinned action tags that their SHA-pinning security rulesets reject.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Every concern practitioners raise, most raised first.
Counted for All practitioners.
Mixed
ziyou979, GitHub user filing an issue against Factory-AI/factory
600s host limit cuts off long-thinking Opus responses, causing repeated restarts and wasted usageGitHub issue on Factory-AI/factory
On a Factory subscription, Opus 5.5 responses that think longer than 600 seconds are cut off and all thinking is discarded. Droid retries once from scratch and hits the same limit, so each attempt costs about 20 minutes and twice the usage with no output.
"So each attempt costs ~20 minutes and twice the usage, yet produces no output. Retrying the task by hand repeats the same cycle and keeps burning usage."
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
RoacherM, GitHub user filing an issue against Factory-AI/factory
Reading a file that quotes a blocklisted client phrase 403s the session, false positive, misreported as auth failureGitHub issue on Factory-AI/factory
After Droid read a design note that quoted phrases on Factory's backend blocklist, every later request in the session failed with a 403 reported as an authentication failure. Resuming or compacting the session could not clear it, because the file text stays in the history.
"Resuming the session repeats the 403 forever, because the tool result is part of the history and is re-sent every turn."
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
NDilanka, GitHub user on the Factory desktop app
Windows Defender quarantined a live Droid transcript; the turn crashed, output was lost and the session vanished without explanation.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
drawmeanelephant, GitHub user running Agent Readiness reports, self-described
Readiness reports can evaluate a stale worktree without warningGitHub issue
A readiness report silently scored a stale worktree at 47.76% (Level 3); the current commit scored 80.60% (Level 5), making the result misleading.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Mixed
joshwilhelmi, GitHub user running droid exec under a sandbox
In sandboxes without ps, every Droid Execute call is SIGKILLed within milliseconds because its supervisor treats a failed probe as owner death.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
thedevtoni, GitHub user running droid-action automated PR review on a private repository
droid-action two-pass review with glm-5.3 posted the same review four times and clipped comment bodies, forcing a cleanup step in their workflow.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; ran the rollout; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Mixed
Roderick-Clemente, GitHub user systematically testing droid exec, self-described
droid exec --mission performs no work and reports success (num_turns 0, zero tokens, exit 0)GitHub issue
droid exec with --mission did no work yet reported success with zero turns, tokens and credits, while the same task without --mission edited the file.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
Antaripa Saha, machine learning engineer at Parlance Labs
Do Automated Evals Work?Company research article, Parlance Labs
Saha and coauthor Hamel Husain tested Droid on production apartment-leasing traces: it achieved 84.6% recall and 83.3% precision, with 10 false positives. They found coding agents competitive with dedicated evaluation platforms, but every tested system missed business-context failures and needed human annotations.
"Factory Droid (GPT-5.5 High) 84.6% 83.3% 17 10…"
"General-purpose coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Factory Droid were competitive with the platforms."
"No system we tested did the one thing that would have helped most: interview us. Every tool treated error analysis as a one-shot task, with traces in and a report out."
Practitioner account, name and role on their organization's own page; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Negative
Electronic-File-4652, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Operation failed - check parametersReddit post
Droid used up their 5-hour usage limit by failing to create files about 50 times in a row with the same error.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Cost predictability and limits
Mixed
mlcarl, GitHub user running Droid Missions, self-described
ProposeMission tool crashes with "undefined is not an object (evaluating 'H.length')" in droid 0.150.1GitHub issue
After a 19-hour Mission completed successfully, every new Mission failed because ProposeMission crashed in droid 0.150.1 with a BYOK GLM model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Negative
jm3823, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid no longer better than cc or codexReddit post
jm3823 says Droid fell behind Claude Code and Codex after Factory's focus on the app and Droid Core, and that Missions now take two days to accomplish nothing.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability
Mixed
hdot123, GitHub user on a Factory team plan, self-described
Bug: BYOK session fails with empty response, code-server SIGABRT on new sessionGitHub issue
A failing BYOK GLM-5.2 proxy gave only an opaque empty-response error and then left the CLI unable to start new sessions until processes were killed.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Negative
Academic-Assignment2, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Subagent FailuresReddit post
With BYOK models only, the commenter's subagents fail consistently on Linux and Windows. They found few fixes from other users.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Negative
jrhabana, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
How to fix "factoryd appears to be unavailable.."Reddit post
Workers keep failing with a factoryd-unavailable error on several BYOK providers, and restarting and resuming rarely works.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
hboon, Independent developer (30 years experience, per profile posts)
Comment on: OpenCode - Open source AI coding agentHacker News comment
Switched to Droid because Claude Code broke too often; Droid also broke occasionally, so hboon stopped upgrading it.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Adoption and upkeep
Negative
mylifeasacoder, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Tried Droid for a few simple features. Scratched it off the list.Reddit post
On a free trial with GPT-5.3-Codex, Droid wrote about 605 lines for one feature. It only half worked after 2 to 3 retries and used about 1 million tokens. Claude Code found and fixed the root cause.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Mixed
theturtletalks, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAIHacker News comment
Runs GPT-5.2, Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 in Droid CLI; Gemini loops and breaks tool calls, sometimes corrupting a thread so it cannot be rewound to another model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
Jeremy Grove, Developer and author of MediaDataFusion guides
Claude Code & Factory AI Droid: Testing Kimi K2 ThinkingVideo, YouTube
Running one task with Kimi K2 Thinking in Claude Code and in Droid, Jeremy Grove saw Droid's attempts fail much as Claude Code's did.
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Operational control
Negative
Warm_Sandwich3769, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
New updates are forcing me to quitReddit post
A paying user who brought 15 developer friends to Droid says recent updates broke the interface, image attachments for a custom GLM model, and JSON handling, with no changelog or rollback.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
heretiqal, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid is really trying hard to encourage me to cancelReddit post
Mid-refactor, Droid opened a blank session with no memory of the work. heretiqal could not find the old session but still rates Droid above Cursor and Warp.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
AICodeKing, AI coding tool reviewer
Droid CLI + GLM-4.6 + FREE 4.5 Sonnet,GPT-5 : Is it really the NEXT CLAUDE CODE?Video, YouTube (AICodeKing)
AICodeKing tested Droid with Sonnet 4.5 on four projects. Three failed, and the fourth missed a dependency. GLM-4.6 did better. AICodeKing found Factory's agent claims did not match those results.
"…this correctly either. It did get the bars implemented, but the step counter doesn't work. it almost never oneshots anything. Then I thought maybe it was focused more on large repos. So I tried my open code repo question and it failed…"
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits
Mixed
LouisDeconinck, GitHub user connecting Droid to T3 Code over ACP
ACP session/set_config_option returns {} instead of required configOptionsGitHub issue
Droid 0.234.0 returned an invalid ACP config response, making it unusable in T3 Code for every model.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
hrmesquita, GitHub user on the Factory desktop app with BYOK models
Desktop 0.184.0: new sessions reset custom-model default to auto (custom models missing from picker)GitHub issue
After updating to Desktop 0.184.0, the author's 14 local custom models briefly show in the model picker and then disappear, and new sessions start on auto, overriding the custom default. It worked on 0.183.2.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Mixed
marovole, GitHub user running Droid with a BYOK OpenAI-compatible model
With a BYOK OpenAI-compatible model, parallel tool calls returning images corrupt the session history so every later turn fails.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
snguyen-cars, GitHub user delegating to custom droids
Custom droids receive zero MCP tools despite valid configurationGitHub issue
Custom droid subagents received no MCP tools even though the parent session could call them, so MCP-backed custom droids did not work.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
addidotlol, GitHub user of Droid in Zed
Opening a new thread while another is responding causes Droid to block new threadsGitHub issue
In Zed, opening a new Droid thread while another streams locks new threads; the Zed Agent and OpenCode did not show the bug.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Negative
Sakrilegi0us, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid is failing to compress every time and I have to start a new chat.Reddit post
Every time the conversation reaches the context window, compression fails with a stream error, and switching models fails too, so Sakrilegi0us starts a new chat.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Negative
GTHell, Reddit user in r/ChatGPTCoding
Ask Droid CLI to implement some specs and set mode to (Auto) - High and now it destroy the whole OSReddit post
Running a spec in Auto (High) mode, Droid wiped their WSL Arch installation; a config backup and pushed code limited the loss.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
GILD's fact checks, which don't count as sources
Checked Oct 12, 2026.Factory ships the Droid CLI and desktop app continuously, with 24 release entries in its changelog in September 2026. It tags features that are still maturing. A bug report against one version does not establish that the current version has it. Feature Maturity
Open them in the recordCounted for All practitioners.
Raised as a concern, 11
Mixed
glmn, GitHub user building a host around interactive Droid sessions
permission_prompt Notification hook has no tool name or input ("needs permission to execute 1 tool(s)")GitHub issue
Droid permission notifications omit the tool and command, so with several sessions open users cannot see which approval is risky without switching terminals.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
zach-hammad-vs, GitHub user qualifying the Droid SDK for a restricted tool set, self-described
ToolSearch remains allowed after acknowledged disabledToolIds updateGitHub issue
Disabling ToolSearch through the SDK was acknowledged but the tool stayed allowed, blocking their read-only qualification.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
zyaiire, GitHub user committing evaluation data with Droid
False positives for SHA-256 hashes and run metadata in Droid-ShieldGitHub issue
Droid-Shield repeatedly blocked commits of checksums and run metadata as secrets, with no way to approve false positives inside Droid.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
Roderick-Clemente, GitHub user systematically testing droid exec, self-described
.factory/hooks.json is silently never read at project scope (documented primary location)GitHub issue
Hooks in the documented .factory/hooks.json never fire, so guard hooks silently do nothing while runs exit successfully.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
Robin Min, Independent developer and author of Surfing
Droid CLI Review: Hands-On Experience After Free TrialPersonal blog post, Surfing (surfing.salty.vip)
After several days on the free trial, praises the Droid CLI's concise, clean TUI and model agnosticism, but calls its permission management weak, suspecting every programmer could find 101 ways around its string-array checks. Has recently used Claude Code with Claude Code Router across models.
Practitioner account; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
rjmurillo, GitHub user in a security-constrained organization
Request: Use SHA-pinned action references for security-constrained repositoriesGitHub issue
Cannot adopt droid-action for automated PR reviews because it uses unpinned action tags that their SHA-pinning security rulesets reject.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
mediumbrownfox, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Is there a YOLO mode similar to claude code?Reddit post
mediumbrownfox loves Droid with Gemini 3 but must approve plans every 30 seconds even on Auto (High), and wants a sandboxed mode to let it run alone.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Negative
GTHell, Reddit user in r/ChatGPTCoding
Ask Droid CLI to implement some specs and set mode to (Auto) - High and now it destroy the whole OSReddit post
Running a spec in Auto (High) mode, Droid wiped their WSL Arch installation; a config backup and pushed code limited the loss.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
vizh, GitHub user running Droid in Zed over ACP
In ACP mode a new Droid session carries the conversation history of earlier sessions in the same process, so a fresh Zed chat remembers another chat.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Positive
Apprehensive_Half_68, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Damn impressed with Droid CLIReddit post
Six parallel Droid agents finished work Apprehensive_Half_68 estimated at several days in a few hours; Spec Mode, session management, and speed impressed, and Droid Shield flagged false secrets.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
AICodeKing, AI coding tool reviewer
Droid CLI + GLM-4.6 + FREE 4.5 Sonnet,GPT-5 : Is it really the NEXT CLAUDE CODE?Video, YouTube (AICodeKing)
AICodeKing tested Droid with Sonnet 4.5 on four projects. Three failed, and the fourth missed a dependency. GLM-4.6 did better. AICodeKing found Factory's agent claims did not match those results.
"…this correctly either. It did get the bars implemented, but the step counter doesn't work. it almost never oneshots anything. Then I thought maybe it was focused more on large repos. So I tried my open code repo question and it failed…"
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits
Discussed without concern, 4
Mixed
joshwilhelmi, GitHub user running droid exec under a sandbox
In sandboxes without ps, every Droid Execute call is SIGKILLed within milliseconds because its supervisor treats a failed probe as owner death.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
Spiritual_Course4522, Reddit user in r/ClaudeAI
Factory AI being annoying - how to fix?Reddit post
Compared with Copilot on the same Claude model, Droid runs many environment-checking commands and writes into the codebase; Spiritual_Course4522 wants it to propose code instead.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
mrwogu, GitHub user building on the Droid Python SDK
Python SDK 0.1.2 is behind the current Droid JSON-RPC surfaceGitHub issue
The Python SDK lags the Droid CLI and TypeScript SDK, so tool disabling, structured output and context methods need private APIs.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Positive
Sid Bharath, Independent writer on AI agents (hands-on Droid tutorial)
Factory Droid Tutorial: Missions, Skills, and AgentsPersonal blog post, sidbharath.com
Bharath finds Factory most interesting when the work is larger than a code edit, such as a migration with a planner, several workers, validation and a review trail. Warns that Missions' coordination has a cost: more outputs to review and more tokens spent rediscovering the same context.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits, Adoption and upkeep
GILD's fact checks, which don't count as sources
Checked Oct 12, 2026.Factory documents permission rules, an organization-wide maximum autonomy level, and an OS-level sandbox on macOS and Linux. It states that command rules alone are not operating-system isolation. Autonomy Level
Open them in the recordCounted for All practitioners.
Raised as a concern, 8
Mixed
ziyou979, GitHub user filing an issue against Factory-AI/factory
600s host limit cuts off long-thinking Opus responses, causing repeated restarts and wasted usageGitHub issue on Factory-AI/factory
On a Factory subscription, Opus 5.5 responses that think longer than 600 seconds are cut off and all thinking is discarded. Droid retries once from scratch and hits the same limit, so each attempt costs about 20 minutes and twice the usage with no output.
"So each attempt costs ~20 minutes and twice the usage, yet produces no output. Retrying the task by hand repeats the same cycle and keeps burning usage."
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Negative
sunoval2017, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Fresh usage measurementReddit post
Measuring the Pro plan on GPT-5.6 Sol, sunoval2017 found the weekly limit equals about 2.94 five-hour windows and the monthly limit about 11.1, tighter than Codex.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Mixed
waxyslave, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Why do GPT coding models have such a fetish for dispatching sub-agents?Reddit post
GPT models in Droid keep spawning sub-agents that block the main thread and burn usage, even though their AGENTS.md forbids them unless asked.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Operational control
Negative
Electronic-File-4652, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Operation failed - check parametersReddit post
Droid used up their 5-hour usage limit by failing to create files about 50 times in a row with the same error.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Cost predictability and limits
Negative
rameloxnine, Reddit user in r/ClaudeAI
BEWARE of factory.ai. 10x more expensive than Claude Code and you can't cancel your subscription.Reddit post
rameloxnine found Droid at least 10 times more expensive than Claude Code and says Factory kept charging after cancellation, with no support response.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Mixed
OliverGeorge8, GitHub user running custom droids from Spec Mode
Custom droid glm-5.2 pin intermittently falls back to GPT-5.6 SolGitHub issue
A custom droid pinned to Droid Core glm-5.2 silently ran on the pricier GPT-5.6 Sol parent model during parallel Spec Mode tasks.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Negative
mylifeasacoder, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Tried Droid for a few simple features. Scratched it off the list.Reddit post
On a free trial with GPT-5.3-Codex, Droid wrote about 605 lines for one feature. It only half worked after 2 to 3 retries and used about 1 million tokens. Claude Code found and fixed the root cause.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
Positive
Sid Bharath, Independent writer on AI agents (hands-on Droid tutorial)
Factory Droid Tutorial: Missions, Skills, and AgentsPersonal blog post, sidbharath.com
Bharath finds Factory most interesting when the work is larger than a code edit, such as a migration with a planner, several workers, validation and a review trail. Warns that Missions' coordination has a cost: more outputs to review and more tokens spent rediscovering the same context.
Practitioner account, self-described; direct use; counts toward Operational control, Cost predictability and limits, Adoption and upkeep
Discussed without concern, 7
Positive
FindingSerendipity_1, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Factory Droid vs Cursor Usage QuotaReddit post
A new subscriber finds the Droid Core pool of open models useful and generous on top of the standard usage pool.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Cost predictability and limits
Positive
rmaxdev, Hacker News commenter
Comment on: GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the priceHacker News comment
Runs a Hermes orchestrator on DeepSeek Flash that delegates heavy development work to Codex and Droid harnesses on subscriptions.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, takes no position
Positive
hboon, Independent developer
Comment on: Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed againHacker News comment
Switched to Droid with Opus on Claude Max many months ago and it was the author's favorite combo, but had to stop because "they don't like us proxying requests anymore".
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Mixed
cambryceyt, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Configured VibeProxy to use OpenAI subscription and having problems with contextReddit post
cambryceyt moved from Codex to Droid and loves it, but routing an OpenAI subscription through a proxy after running out of Factory credits forces a compaction every few prompts.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Positive
jared0x90, Hacker News commenter, self-described
Comment on: GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding CapabilityHacker News comment
Asks why "nobody seems to be trying it" with Factory's Droid in the thread, and says Droid BYOK with GLM4.7 "seems like a really cost effective backup" in the little they have experimented with it.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Operational control
Positive
mengmota, Developer of an OpenCode plugin
Comment on: Show HN: Oh-My-Opencode: US$24,000 Worth Spent. Built Async agents, Curated AgentsHacker News comment
After burning about US$24,000 of tokens comparing agents, singles out Droid for precision and copies that trait into an OpenCode plugin.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; not counted, repeats a stronger account
Positive
travbarb, Reddit user in r/ClaudeCode
droid + sonnet 4.5Reddit post
Says the Droid CLI with Sonnet 4.5 feels like a completely different thing from Claude Code: every problem Claude Code fell to pieces on, Droid is basically one-shotting. Still in the free token window after many hours, with the understanding that it is "expensive maybe" from there.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Delivered outcomes
GILD's fact checks, which don't count as sources
Checked Oct 12, 2026.Individual plans run on rolling 5-hour, 7-day, and 30-day rate limits at per-model multipliers. They include a free Droid Core fallback and prepaid Extra Usage. Sources written under the earlier token-allowance plans describe a pricing model Factory has since replaced. Individual Plans
Open them in the recordCounted for All practitioners.
Mixed
vizh, GitHub user running Droid in Zed over ACP
In ACP mode a new Droid session carries the conversation history of earlier sessions in the same process, so a fresh Zed chat remembers another chat.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
kasajian, GitHub user of Droid CLI on Windows
Running droid doesn't see AGENTS.md file in user's .factory folder if it's a symlinkGitHub issue
Reports that on Windows the droid CLI does not see an AGENTS.md in the user's .factory folder when it is a symlink, and works once the file is copied there. Doesn't know if it is Windows only.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
cambryceyt, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Configured VibeProxy to use OpenAI subscription and having problems with contextReddit post
cambryceyt moved from Codex to Droid and loves it, but routing an OpenAI subscription through a proxy after running out of Factory credits forces a compaction every few prompts.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability, Operational control
Negative
Sakrilegi0us, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid is failing to compress every time and I have to start a new chat.Reddit post
Every time the conversation reaches the context window, compression fails with a stream error, and switching models fails too, so Sakrilegi0us starts a new chat.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
Oliver, Author of a Substack newsletter on AI tools (aileverage.substack.com)
ChatGPT Codex vs FactoryNewsletter, aileverage.substack.com
Testing Codex and Factory on the same two tasks, Oliver found Factory's custom droids strong at planning and repo comprehension, but its system prompts can overwrite messages in longer chats and GitHub repo linking doesn't always work. Codex felt steadier building the speech-to-text app.
Practitioner account, self-described; structured test; counts toward Delivered outcomes, Reliability, Operational control, Adoption and upkeep
Mixed
RoacherM, GitHub user filing an issue against Factory-AI/factory
Reading a file that quotes a blocklisted client phrase 403s the session, false positive, misreported as auth failureGitHub issue on Factory-AI/factory
After Droid read a design note that quoted phrases on Factory's backend blocklist, every later request in the session failed with a 403 reported as an authentication failure. Resuming or compacting the session could not clear it, because the file text stays in the history.
"Resuming the session repeats the 403 forever, because the tool result is part of the history and is re-sent every turn."
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; structured test; counts toward Reliability
Mixed
heretiqal, Reddit user in r/FactoryAi
Droid is really trying hard to encourage me to cancelReddit post
Mid-refactor, Droid opened a blank session with no memory of the work. heretiqal could not find the old session but still rates Droid above Cursor and Warp.
Practitioner account, pseudonymous; direct use; counts toward Reliability
GILD's fact checks, which don't count as sources
Checked Oct 12, 2026.Factory documents AGENTS.md as the place for durable project instructions, commands, and guardrails. Conventions then survive a new session even when the conversation history does not. AGENTS.md
Open them in the recordStatements this group's sources agree on, then the ones close to agreement.
Close to agreement: each needs 17 supporting sources
The same model performs differently inside Droid than inside other agents, so the harness matters alongside the model.
8 supporting sourcesPlanning the change first, in Spec Mode or with a stronger model writing the spec, produces better results than letting Droid edit straight away.
6 supporting sourcesQuestions the sources split on, with the count on each side.
Evidence remains split
Main agent, 9 sources
Some moved their daily work to Droid, often for model choice, and dropped other subscriptions.
Second tool, 14 sources
Others keep Claude Code, Codex, or another agent as their main tool and use Droid for comparison or backup.
Evidence remains split
Broader autonomy, 4 sources
Some run high autonomy, Missions, or parallel droids and review the result.
Tighter steering, 2 sources
Others want Droid to propose changes and run fewer commands on its own.
The three groups, then every practitioner by the context they work in, and how emphasis changes with scale.
Three groups drawn from the same sources. Choose a group to select whose experience counts. Within that group, each author counts once in the practitioner sentiment, with their latest view. Signals open on All practitioners. Leaders and teams have 4 accounts; GILD prints their sentiment from 20.
7 sources. These accounts focus on team rollout, automated review in CI, shared policy, usage cost, and what changes when Droid moves from one engineer to many.
78 sources. These accounts focus on model choice, planning, whether a session finishes, and how Droid compares with the other agents each builder runs.
85 sources. These accounts give the broadest read. They mix solo and team settings, which can reach different conclusions about Droid.
85 sources from practitioners, by the context they work in. Filled rows count for this group.
Emphasizes Model choice, planning, and whether a session finishes
Emphasizes Automated review in CI and several sessions at once
Emphasizes Merged work and cost per change
Emphasizes Model policy and whether engineers keep using it
What changes with scale. Individual builders judge Droid on model choice, on whether a session finishes, and on how fast the plan's limits run out. The seven multi-person accounts turn to automated review, parallel sessions, release stability, and how Droid compares with other agents.
Where this group's sources were published.
Counted for All practitioners, from 85 sources. Change group
103 sources for this group, 18 of them documentation
Older evidence is retained when it still applies. Sources that depend on a changed plan, price, or product surface stay in the history, marked Needs a recheck.
See sources by originWho each source is, how it knows, whether it still applies and what it counts toward.
Newest first, on its own page. Every count above opens its sources there.
Read all 103 sourcesAbout this read
A running review of what engineering teams report about Factory, from individual builders to engineering leaders. Each finding links to its sources, and each conflict shows both sides.
Counts cover only the sources GILD reviewed.
Choose a group to select whose experience counts. Within that group, each author counts once in the practitioner sentiment, with their latest view. GILD files each source in a group from how the account describes its author. A role or employer marked self-described is what the source states about themselves. Documentation checks facts for every group and never counts toward sentiment.
A source's date and whether it still applies are separate: a recent post can describe an old version, and an old one can still hold.
Flagged for a recheck, of the sources that take a side: leaders and teams 2 of 4, individual builders 5 of 50, all practitioners 7 of 54.
Each row opens its sources for the group you are reading.
| Finding | Engineering leaders and teams | Individual builders | All practitioners | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current readCurrent sentiment | 1 positive, 2 mixed, 1 negative | 25 positive, 12 mixed, 13 negative | 26 positive, 14 mixed, 14 negative | Sources |
| PraiseModel choice | 0 of 1 positive (under the minimum) | 15 of 21 positive | 15 of 22 positive | Sources |
| PraiseDeveloper experience | 0 of 2 positive (under the minimum) | 9 of 19 positive | 9 of 21 positive | Sources |
| PraiseBackground & delegated work | 1 of 4 positive (under the minimum) | 6 of 16 positive | 7 of 20 positive | Sources |
| PraiseEnd-to-end execution | 0 of 0 positive (under the minimum) | 9 of 9 positive | 9 of 9 positive | Sources |
| ConcernReliability & bugs | 3 of 3 raise it (under the minimum) | 25 of 25 raise it | 28 of 28 raise it | Sources |
| ConcernPermissions & safety controls | 2 of 2 raise it (under the minimum) | 9 of 13 raise it | 11 of 15 raise it | Sources |
| ConcernUsage and cost | 0 of 0 raise it (under the minimum) | 8 of 15 raise it | 8 of 15 raise it | Sources |
| ConcernContext & compaction | 0 of 0 raise it (under the minimum) | 7 of 7 raise it | 7 of 7 raise it | Sources |
| ConsensusPlan before code | 0 supporting (under the minimum) | 6 supporting (below threshold) | 6 supporting (below threshold) | Sources |
| ConsensusThe harness changes results | 0 supporting (under the minimum) | 8 supporting (below threshold) | 8 supporting (below threshold) | Sources |
| DisagreementIs Droid a team's main coding agent, or a second tool beside another? | Main agent 0, Second tool 1 (under the minimum) | Main agent 9, Second tool 13 | Main agent 9, Second tool 14 | Sources |
| DisagreementHow much should Droid do before a human checks in? | Broader autonomy 0, Tighter steering 0 (under the minimum) | Broader autonomy 4, Tighter steering 2 | Broader autonomy 4, Tighter steering 2 | Sources |
| Current readEvidence mix | 25 sources | 96 sources | 103 sources | Sources |
GILD's checks of claims against official documentation, kept apart from the source counts.
