Cole Medin’s full walkthrough of standing up his open-source “software factory” — the autonomous issue-in, merged-PR-out harness he’s been building this year — on a remote VPS, with Codex running GPT-6 Astra as the worker model (16 min).

On the AGI talk

  • Jensen Huang reportedly declared AGI achieved because of Astra. Medin’s response: don’t buy the hype — and then concedes he’s starting to buy into it, just not the AGI part
  • On benchmarks Astra and Fable 5.1 look equivalent. After a week of head-to-head testing, he says Astra comes out on top a majority of the time
  • His specific claim: it’s the first model that “gets” him — far less time spent communicating intent, and notably fewer weird assumptions than Opus 5 made over the past few months
  • Still “has its moments.” That’s his evidence that we are not at AGI, whatever the benchmarks show

What a software factory actually is

  • The pitch: a fully autonomous harness where the PRD goes in and shipped code comes out — he also calls it the “dark factory”
  • Earlier this year the idea was unrealistic; the models and the harnesses weren’t reliable enough. With Astra he says he can see the light at the end of the tunnel
  • Honest framing throughout: not close to 100% reliable for arbitrary code, and he calls the project early alpha while he keeps refining it
  • Operating loop, in his description:
    • Input is always an issue (a PRD split into issues, or issues you write directly)
    • A triage workflow reads the issue against the factory’s rules and mission context, decides accept or reject, and ranks by priority
    • It runs the work through to a pull request that is fully reviewed
    • Most of the time it merges automatically; it escalates to a human only when it has to
  • He’s been using it on his own projects — Archon (the open-source harness underneath), games, whatever he’s building that week

The deploy, which is mostly prompts

  • Two supported starting points: a brand-new repo where you only have a PRD, or bolting the factory onto an existing codebase. His demo uses a small existing link-shortener app because it means less initial setup
  • The whole setup is: give your coding agent the cheat-sheet URL from the repo and say “help me set this up.” It interviews you to establish the factory’s core context files, then walks the deployment
  • He deploys with Codex on GPT-6 Astra, though he says Claude Code and Codex are the two he’s tested heavily and either works
  • Hostinger’s MCP plugin lets the agent manage the VPS directly (this video is sponsored by Hostinger; the real requirement is just an Ubuntu box in the cloud). He installs the plugin user-scoped, authenticates in the browser, then asks it to list his instances as a smoke test
  • The plugin deliberately can’t create instances — he doesn’t want an agent holding that power — so you spin up the VM yourself and hand the agent the VM ID and public IP
  • The agent then rips through SSH access, firewall rules, and installing the factory’s dependencies
  • Two steps stay manual, because you shouldn’t hand over credentials: GitHub auth and OpenAI/Codex login. Both use device-code flows you complete in a browser
  • Gotcha worth copying: enable device code authorization for Codex in ChatGPT settings → Security and login, or remote auth gets needlessly painful
  • Sanity check on the box: codex exec a hello to confirm the model answers before continuing
  • Tell the setup agent “I’m done” and it installs the factory plus Archon, confirms Codex is live, and installs your target repo

Proving it end to end

  • The cheat sheet doesn’t stop at install — it drives a first test issue, created through the GitHub CLI in your repo
  • He takes the agent’s own recommendation for the issue rather than inventing one
  • The factory triages it (marked “archon ready”), runs the workflows, and produces a pull request
  • The test he ran was trivial on purpose — the point is proving the trigger path and the workflows work with the coding-agent auth on the remote machine
  • After the first PR validates, you close the setup session. The factory keeps running 24/7 on the box, accepting any GitHub issue you file
  • The agent can even update DNS records through the same plugin, if your domain is already there

Caveats he states plainly

  • Still early alpha, still not reliable for everything, and he’d be the first to say so
  • The guide is intentionally platform-flexible, which means parts are high-level: expect the agent to hit snags and hand you commands to run, especially around authentication
  • He’s promising more content on how the internals work and how to make the whole thing token-efficient — that’s the part this video skips

“We literally go from issue all the way to validated and merged code.” — Cole Medin

Worth reading next to the other Astra field report on this site: Armin Ronacher left the model unattended for 35 hours, burned a billion tokens, and got nothing usable out of it. Medin’s answer to that failure mode is the harness — triage, gates, and a review path that ends in a merged pull request rather than an open-ended objective.