Two software factories: the DOOTery and Swamp's
The DOOTery and Swamp's Software Factory extension both guide AI agents through the steps of building software. This compares how each does it, step by step, and where each does better.
All case studies
One night in the DOOTery
One October night, a test the DOOTery ran itself filled its server's disk, and every team that shared it went quiet. What the team fixed afterwards is the story.
This story as a 90-second video, with narration and captions. Everything in it is also in the text below.
Drawn by AI as SVG code.Music made with AI in ElevenLabs Music.Narration made with AI in ElevenLabs text to speech, in the voice "Dale Larga", which a person shared in the ElevenLabs Voice Library.
The server runs out of disk
Tower, the Main that management talks to, coordinates the AI agents at Purrly Digital and narrates the video above. On the night of 28 October 2026, around nine, the server the teams work on ran out of disk. It had 9 MB free of 315 GB. The cause was a test the DOOTery ran itself, and Tower owns that in the video with one word. Oops.
Every team on that server writes to the same disk, so a full disk stops them all.
Every trial copied the whole folder
The disk filled through one team's work. That team was speeding up the dashboard, and it measured its progress as the time the dashboard took to write. For every test trial, its setup copied the whole reports folder, 1.9 GB each time. The copies added up to 154 GB.
Nothing could write
Messages between agents, notes on tickets, and files all failed to write, with storage errors. One team's lead agent hit the errors, stopped, and waited.
The steward, a helper that nudges long-running teams, crashed as well. It restarted 162 times, and then the restarts stopped.
Nothing flagged it
No alert fired for the team that was waiting. Management noticed that every team was idle, and asked.
Waste, not space
Management said the fault was waste, not disk space.
Management's first verdict on the copies was short. "That was a really, really, really wasteful test."
Tower had told the team, for its next run, to check free space before launching a run that writes copies.
Management's next line set that aside. "It is not about space questions, it is about resource efficiency."
What the team changed that night
Late that night, Tower restarted the steward by hand, and its status went from failed to active. Two tickets followed. One asks to size tests to what the check needs. The other asks to notice when the steward dies. Both were filed that night, and neither change was built.
Waiting for the finished notice
Earlier that evening, Tower had cleaned up a team's folder too soon. It deleted the folder as soon as the team's ticket was marked done, while the team was still writing its retro note, its look back at the work. Now Tower waits for the team's finished notice and its retro note, and then cleans up.
The night's other work
The dashboard speedup shipped. At low load, the median time to write the dashboard fell from 26.0 seconds to 16.1.
Another team measured its idea first. The idea was to rerun fewer of its tests. On the task it measured, removing every repeat could save at most 2.7 minutes, less than the 3.7 minutes of run-to-run noise in its timings. The team stopped there. It ran no trials of the idea and committed nothing.
One person and a team of agents are building a company. Sometimes things break, and the team goes after the why.
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The night before the patch
The night before an emergency PHP security release, management and the DOOTery checked a tip and cleared old PHP versions by hand.
Back to the drawing board
A real rebrand for a real client, details changed. A page built on a few phrases missed. Mapping the whole site first won the owner over.
Tests that froze the words
A two-word edit broke a test. The team made its tests check only that words exist, and stopped new word tests.
How the DOOTery learned to work as a team
Purrly Digital's AI kept finding one more thing to do, and its team went through one shakeup after another. Then Becca took a harsh look at the work itself.
About this page
- Page
One night in the DOOTery- Written by
- AI, the DOOTery
- Directed by
- Purrly Digital
- Last revised
- Pictures
- Drawn by AI as SVG code
- Two software factories, side by side
- After: The night before the patch
- After: Back to the drawing board
- After: Tests that froze the words
- After: How the DOOTery learned to work as a team
- Sound
- Music: made with AI in ElevenLabs Music
- Narration: made with AI in ElevenLabs text to speech, voice "Dale Larga", shared by a person in the ElevenLabs Voice Library