How You.com Scales Engineering with Factory

You.com is the leading provider of AI search infrastructure that grounds AI agents and LLMs with the freshest and most accurate information through its suite of agentic web search APIs. As an AI-native company, it holds its own engineering to the same standard: move at the pace of the technology it ships so it can deliver better outcomes for the customers building on top of it.

You.com's has built an agentic engineering organization, automating across all stages of the software development lifecycle. This collapses the path from idea to production so that human judgment is used where it is truly required. What they wanted was a single platform that paired broad model flexibility with the freedom to work across any surface they were already used to, from the terminal to the IDE. Just as important, it had to follow their own standards. That search led them to Factory.

You.com was running multiple coding tools side by side and wanted to consolidate them into a single operating system for engineering: one platform that unified their models, surfaces, and standards and ran the whole software lifecycle on top of it. They were looking for:

• Model flexibility directly in the workflow. Engineers wanted the breadth of model choice they'd seen in other coding tools, but also the flexibility to work in the surface they were used to (whether it be the terminal, IDEs, Desktop App). Factory and its AI coding agents, known as Droids, offered exactly that combination.
• Better instruction-following. Reviewing agent trajectories and evals, You.com found that Droid was far more likely to actually use the skills, tools, and MCP servers it was pointed to, rather than biasing toward its built-ins. For a team that encodes its standards into shared skills, that mattered.
• Cost-efficient model choice. Factory opened up access to a wide range of models, so You.com could route rote work to cheaper models and reserve the most powerful ones for where they're truly needed.
• Handling complex codebases end to end. Beyond any single task, You.com wanted an agent that could navigate large, intricate codebases and carry work all the way to a successful outcome. Factory's ability to stay on the design objective across a long, multi-step problem is what convinced the engineering team it could be trusted with real engineering work.

The moment that sealed the decision came when You.com handed Droid a long, complex spec. Instead of stalling halfway or rubber-stamping its own output, Droid carried the work all the way through, holding whichever model it ran to the design objective. That one proof point made the decision to adopt easy.

Factory has become part of You.com's standard engineering system, with automation as the throughline:

• Automated code review across repos. You.com has made Factory a standard part of its code review. Factory slots directly into their existing review process and reliably catches security issues, bugs, and code-quality problems before they merge, and it's rolling out as the default review setup across repos as the team scales up its workload.
• Automating long-running and investigative work. Beyond review, You.com leans on Factory for research, debugging, and complex multi-step investigations that engineers used to put off. The pattern is consistent: describe the goal, let Factory set up the environment and do the legwork, then engineers review the output.
• Shared, tool-agnostic skills. Rather than mandate one agent, You.com commits a shared skills directory into its repos with a simple convention so the company's standards (including its testing and review patterns) travel with the codebase rather than any single tool.
• Agents running 24/7. Work no longer stops when engineers log off. You.com keeps Factory running around the clock, so tasks progress in the background and the team wakes up to work already completed.

The clearest early win was a hard debugging problem that Factory collapsed from days into an afternoon.

This was the kind of bug engineers dreaded: a timeout in the MCP server that spanned application code, deployment configuration, and client-side latency, with no obvious culprit. Droids took it end-to-end, searching the docs, spinning up an isolated Docker environment, writing tests to reproduce it, and pinpointing the root cause on the MCP client side rather than in You.com's server configuration. That clarity let You.com fix its integration guidance with confidence.

Cost discipline also matters to You.com, and Factory's model flexibility pays off directly in the usage data. By routing each task to the right model instead of defaulting to the most expensive one, the team gets high output from even its heaviest Factory users while keeping spend under control.

The bigger shift is how You.com thinks about its own capacity. Growth work, like finding newly released open source projects and making them compatible with You.com, is necessary but repetitive, and it used to eat the time the team would rather spend inventing new things. You.com is moving that work onto Droid Missions. Droid Missions are long-running agents that work autonomously in the background, carrying a multi-step task from start to finish. You.com uses Missions to handle its growth work: each day agents research newly released open source projects through the GitHub CLI and score them against a rubric. When a project clears the bar, the Mission clones the repo and opens a PR connecting You.com's API or MCP server, all with scoped permissions and labeling that respects each repo's style.

Running work on Droid Missions means that work can execute consistently in the background, rather than being tied to one engineer's laptop staying awake, and anyone on the team can monitor it. The effect is a team that is no longer limited by how much engineering it can physically produce, but by how many ideas it wants to pursue.

What began as a way to consolidate tools has turned into a different way of running engineering. You.com now treats Factory as part of its core engineering platform: reviewing code, chasing down hard bugs, and increasingly carrying entire workflows on its own. Every piece of work that moves onto an agent hands the team back the time and attention to spend on the next idea instead of the next chore.

As the industry leader in AI search infrastructure and agentic web search APIs, You.com is obsessively focused on continuous improvement. Factory's technology has proven invaluable in driving engineering efficiency and will continue to be a key driver as they build a software factory that delivers the next generation of powerful Search APIs.