Most AI coding tools are built around a conversation. You type, the model responds, you review, repeat. Factory's Missions are built around something fundamentally different: you describe a goal, close your laptop, and come back to a finished pull request. That workflow just got a lot more accessible. Missions are now available on the Factory Desktop app, bringing multi-day autonomous engineering tasks to the same interface where you already run your Droids.

The problem every long-running agent hits

Single sessions hit limits. Context windows fill up. Attention degrades over long trajectories. Droid starts forgetting what it already tried, re-reading files, losing track of the bigger picture. The naive fix is to just run multiple agents in parallel, but coordination is hard. Agents conflict, duplicate work, and drift without structure.

Agent sessions work well for focused tasks, but most real projects are too broad and complex for a single context window to hold. A single agent eventually runs into a problem: the more it sees, the less focused and reliable it becomes. Factory's answer to this is a three-role architecture that sidesteps the problem entirely.

How the machine actually works

An orchestrator plans and decomposes the user's goal, steering execution to completion and passing all validation gates. It avoids accumulating overly granular context, delegating all investigation and implementation to subagents and workers. It doesn't drive validation directly -- the system injects validators at milestones to surface gaps.