Software Factory

Work items spawn on the left and need to reach Release on the right at the right quality, in time, without burning your budget.

Items

• Triangles — bug fixes. Cheap, low quality req, but punish slow paths.
• Hexagons — features. Your bread-and-butter.
• Stars — high-stakes releases. Need quality, often a human gate.
• Diamonds — hot priority. Brutal time decay (worth $0 fast).

Stations you can build

• Triage — auto-routes items by quality requirement
• Worker — does the work. Pick haiku/sonnet/opus tier.
• Planner — pre-processes items so downstream stations are 30% faster
• Reviewer — checks quality. Failures bounce back to upstream worker for rework.
• Human Gate — final approval. Approves items meeting quality (stamps to 99%) or rejects them back to the last worker. Uses a scarce slot.

Triage routing

Triage reads each item's quality requirement and routes to the best connected downstream station:

• Hot priority (diamonds) → fastest path that meets quality
• High quality req (stars, ≥85%) → highest-quality station, even a Human Gate
• Other items → cheapest station that meets the item's quality req

Triage only routes to stations directly connected to it. Wire it to multiple tiers so it has real choices.

Editing your factory

• Drag any station to move it
• Click a station to configure it
• Use the panel's Connect to… button to draw an edge to another station
• Right-click an edge to delete it
• B opens the build menu · Space pauses · S changes speed · Esc cancels

What kills you

When a station's queue exceeds its WIP limit, items lose patience fast. Items that abandon cost −$50 each. Watch the rings around items — when they shrink, the item is about to leave.

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