People

Shardul Vaidya

Solutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS, Amazon.

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Solutions architect for data and AI at AWS (the Background Agents Summit session page lists the affiliation as AWS); his talk demonstrates a coding factory he built himself, which he calls "my factory".

Why their word counts: Built and runs the factory he demonstrates, so he can speak to how it works, but it is a personal project and not an AWS product, and he also describes how its pieces map onto AWS services that AWS sells.

Profile from this source, checked 2026-11-08.

In their words

And you can see here that the prompt I provided was very trivial. It's like, hey, we've done a bunch of code review, solve all of the requests from the code review. And you can see that it's generated, I don't know, about 20-something tasks, yeah, about 23 tasks. And we get this beautiful DAG that defines what needs to be done in what order.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 11:35.

  • 23 tasks tasks planned from one prompt, one demo run. Level not stated

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And this actually, as a matter of fact, this whole UI that you're seeing right now was built entirely by the factory. And we can go look at the code for a minute, we can go down to the factory. And you can see here, there's over 300 commits that are essentially very tight requirements down to, right, oh, hey, it's just … net reduction in entropy. And we can force the factory to behave that way.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 13:17.

  • 300 commits factory commits building its own ui, as shown in the demo, 'over 300'. Level not stated

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

Back pressure in our factory comes in two specific ways. The planned reviewer and then the code reviewer. And then there's a deterministic back pressure from the test executor.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 14:10.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And then you can see a whole bunch of these are merged and then we have some failures that say, hey, we've exceeded max rework count. And that's essentially an escalation to me saying, hey, you should probably look at this yourself as a human because you're responsible for the code that it generates.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 12:55.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

The isolation philosophy comes from two things, right? First, we obviously want to reduce the blast radius if a agent goes haywire. That's mainly provided by running these in isolated sandboxes. That can obviously be in Docker or in containers, that can also be on separate EC2 instances. However, you like to manage your isolation.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 16:11.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

The result of all of this is you're no longer writing code. You're composing the factory that writes the code for you. … architect verification frameworks, and fundamentally ensure correctness. You're responsible for it, but without actually writing every line.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 16:55.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

Second, the rework loop is the biggest key. When a task fails, the full context of why it failed is fed forward into the next attempt. That's not a retry, that's essentially just a full rework.

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 8:14.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page

And obviously, if the tests fail, we never get to the code reviewer. This is essentially how a maintainer would refuse to look at a PR…

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

Context. Vaidya, an AWS solutions architect, is describing and demoing a dark factory (software built and merged by agents) that he built himself, which he calls "my factory"; it is not presented as an AWS product. The talk is from the Background Agents Summit, recorded 7 May 2026 and published by Ona.

Talk: Dark Factories: Verification-First Agentic Engineering, Background Agents Summit (YouTube), May 7, 2026, at 15:28.

Not yet checked [ Grade B ] Said in the last year Amazon: $717 billion revenue, FY2025 Sells AI tools Passage page