Run an AI software factory that opens, reviews, and merges PRs

A guide to building agents that open, review, and merge pull requests.

What They Did

The guide breaks a software factory into five stages: intake, isolation, tools, verification and a merge gate. It draws on published setups from Stripe, Spotify, Shopify and Ramp. It gives configs for each stage, including an issue filter, git worktrees per agent, a shared MCP tool block, a screenshot-verification skill and tiered merge rules. A human reviews at the end.

How It Went

Microsoft's dotnet/runtime data shows agent PRs merging 67.9% of the time against 87.1% for engineers, and 55.1% when fully autonomous. Review capacity becomes the bottleneck, and proven results are mostly mechanical migrations.

Worth Knowing

Build the gates before the fleet, and start with one gate where agents cause the most rework. Worktrees start empty, with no .env, dependencies or free port, and non-interactive runs don't clean up after themselves.