AIFactory takes a signed plan and builds it, each task inside its own throwaway Kubernetes Job. The last three weeks were less about new capability and more about a category of bug that is specific to autonomous systems: the builder reporting state that was true of its intention rather than of the world.
Most autonomous coders are trusted on their word. They report a green test suite and you believe them, because there is no cheap way to check. AIFactory is built so that word costs nothing and the evidence costs everything: a passing test checkbox is impossible unless a real test runner actually executed. On 2026-07-19 we drove a plain GitHub issue through the whole pipeline, plan to verdict, with no humans in the loop, and this is the build side of that run.
The most dangerous way for an autonomous coder to fail is quietly. A wrong patch gets caught by tests. A patch that never gets written looks, from a distance, a lot like a build that is still thinking. This cycle we put a number on that distance and then closed it.