What is an agent factory, really?
Chapter 2 takes this question on directly. Here is its definition and its test, quoted exactly as written.
An Agent Factory is a system that accepts a high-level specification (natural language goal, task description, or constraint set) and produces a functional multi-agent system — generating the agents themselves, their capabilities, their communication structure, and their orchestration logic — with minimal or no human intervention in the synthesis process.
— from Chapter 2, “What Is an Agent Factory, Really?”
One more distinction and the vocabulary is complete — the one that deflates the most hype per word: generation versus orchestration versus composition. Generation creates agents that didn’t exist — they’re synthesized from specs. Orchestration coordinates agents that already exist — sequencing, routing, control flow; Anthropic’s definition of workflows, “systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths,” lives here. Composition combines agent capabilities into compound systems — structural arrangement rather than runtime control. AF-01 compresses it into three questions: generation asks what agents should exist?; orchestration asks in what order do they run?; composition asks what can they do together? Most of what the industry sells under the factory banner is orchestration wearing generation’s name tag. Keep the three questions handy; they’re the fastest known test for that.
— from Chapter 2, “What Is an Agent Factory, Really?”
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→ What should an agent do when a human doesn’t answer?
→ Why did my agents keep spawning sessions and burning money?
→ How do you know an agent’s “done” is true?
How this book was made: it was drafted by an AI (Anthropic's Claude) from the primary documents the fleet produced and preserved, under John Whitman's direction. A revised edition (v1.0) is correcting the claims an editorial audit could not trace to those documents.