Josh Wolf, Staff Engineer at Chainguard, tried every memory solution that the AI tooling ecosystem could offer including memory MCPs, memory tools, custom SDKs. "I've tried all of them," he said. "None of them offered what they promised."

Chainguard's engineering team works across large codebases, with a constant influx of upstream package updates and requests, and a rigorous engineering review process that demands context from each step. Existing tools can't keep up.

When Josh started using Factory, he expected the same limitations. Instead, he found himself running the same session for two weeks straight without compromising context awareness or quality.

The compaction difference

"I keep telling Matt (Moore, CTO Chainguard), I've had multiple Droid sessions going on for weeks. Because compaction is just that good."

Factory's compaction engine preserves context across sessions in a way that, to Josh, feels like working with a colleague who simply remembers.

This matters to Chainguard's engineering organization because their engineering workflow isn't just about writing code. For example, Josh's day-to-day work ranges from brainstorming complex ideas to designing those into deliverable chunks as design documents that colleagues review and support, and finally shipping them into production. Code is cheap nowadays. The brainstorming and design work is not.

Teaching once, building many times

At Chainguard, delivering secure open source software often follows recognizable patterns. When something is built a certain way, those patterns can be reused to scale and build many future iterations of that software.

What other tools miss

Josh's daily workflow includes multiple long-running sessions, usually working on different parts of the same project, managing his own git work trees to keep agents isolated. He's tried Claude Code, Codex, the rest.

"The thing I dislike about other CLI agents is that you have to meticulously curate things like skills and commands to effectively seed the context window to perform repeatable tasks. I don't have to do any of that with Droid."

"The main thing I care about is compaction. There are niceties from other tools I give up because it just works, and it works well."

When asked for his initial reaction to Factory's approach: "I was super skeptical. I said I appreciate the golden goose you're chasing, but there's no way this is going to work." He pauses. "Proven wrong."

What Factory unlocks for Chainguard isn't a faster autocomplete or a better code generator. It's the ability to maintain a single thread of work from the first brainstorming session through engineering review, through production deployment, spanning days. The context of why a decision was made, what alternatives were considered, and what the reviewer feedback was: all of it stays accessible.

For a company building trusted open source software at scale, with a review process that requires engineers to explain their thinking at every step and be accountable for the work they produce, Factory's continuity throughout a session changes what's possible. Not by making code cheaper. Code was already cheap. By making the engineering conversation durable.

Looking to accelerate your software development? Learn more about Factory.