# WorkOS says factories must ship outcomes, not PRs _WorkOS engineer Ryan Cooke told AI Engineer the team rebuilt its factory around outcomes after the standard sandbox PR loop proved indistinguishable from local use._ **Published:** 2026-10-03 **Source:** https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/artificial-intelligence/2026/workos-says-factories-must-ship-outcomes-not-prs --- Ryan Cooke, an engineer at [WorkOS](/startups/workos), told [AI Engineer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvboD89DyQ8) that a real software factory is not a sandbox that spits out pull requests. Ramp set the template in [December](https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/technology/2026/aws-saudi-arabia-region-2026-set-for-december) 2025 when it published its Inspect architecture post, saying the agent wrote roughly 30% of merged frontend and backend pull requests. WorkOS tried the standard recipe after that, running an OpenCode router on [Cloudflare](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/cloudflare) sandboxes to generate PRs, but Cooke said the results were indistinguishable from engineers just running Claude Code locally so the team shifted from counting PRs to measuring outcomes. What followed was a two part factory, TARS living in Slack, [Linear](https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/linear) and GitHub and using webhooks to track projects and auto pick up the next blocked ticket, and Horizon orchestrating infrastructure in front of an internal [MCP gateway](https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/artificial-intelligence/2026/ai-native-organizations-run-on-skills) Cooke calls a context engine. That gateway connects to [Snowflake](https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/artificial-intelligence/2026/snowflake-coco-ai-coding-agent-keeps-data-inside) and other internal tools, exposing semantic tables about product usage and customer conversations and letting agents or employees query data directly from Slack without bloating the context window. What still has to happen, Cooke said, is a memory layer with evergreen context about people, teams and products, sandbox ownership to enable self improvement, and a credible answer for authorization that remains unsolved. --- Original analysis from [startuphub.ai](https://www.startuphub.ai), the #1 AI startup directory.