The theory behind Product Printer
Software is no longer a craft. It's a technique.
For seventy years software was built like furniture in a workshop — one artisan, one piece, everything from scratch. That era just ended. When writing code becomes cheap, the value moves to the plan, the parts and the line. So we build like a factory.
From craft to technique
The cost of writing code collapsed
AI agents now write most of the code. The expensive middle of every software project — typing the implementation — became the cheap part almost overnight. Our aim: what used to take a team a quarter, a supervised production line delivers in a week.
Most software is a solved problem
Sign-in, billing, multi-tenancy, languages, monitoring: every business application needs them, and none of them deserves to be reinvented. They are standard parts — catalogue items, not design work.
What stays scarce is the problem itself
Understanding a bike shop, a rental fleet, a care service — and specifying the right thing to build. That is where humans belong. Everything downstream of a good specification can be industrialised.
A craft becomes a technique the moment its steps can be written down, repeated and checked. Software just crossed that line — and once something is a technique, a factory beats a workshop.
The line, station by station
From the first training to running software, station by station. Each one is marked: live runs today; coming is what we are building next.
01Live
It starts with training
Before the line, people: advisors learn to advise SMEs on AI, then train their clients’ teams with a white-labelled course whose last step becomes a new project or new requirements.
Learn more02Live
Requirements first
Nothing is built from a vague brief. A conversation becomes requirements, each with its acceptance criteria, and the line builds only what has been accepted.
03Live
A continuous line
As soon as its requirements are accepted, a workstep goes to a coding agent without a click: one build at a time per project, in order. Each workstep leaves as a pull request.
04Live
Gates on every change
Every pull request passes the project’s CI and security scans, then an AI security review that fails closed: no verdict, no merge, and the merge is pinned to the exact version reviewed. A guard on the main branch refuses to deploy anything that went around the gates.
05Live
Proof per criterion
Every acceptance criterion gets its own test run from CI, recorded after the requirement’s last change merged, and a requirement counts as verified only when all of them pass. A criterion a person checks shows “Human check pending” until it is signed off. The agent’s word never counts.
06Live
Test first, red to green
The test for each acceptance criterion is written first, in its own commit, and must fail in CI before the code makes it pass. Before a change merges, the gate checks that every criterion’s test went from red to green and was not changed on the way; the requirement links both runs.
07Live
A repair loop
When CI or the security review rejects a change, the findings go back to the same agent session, which fixes them on the same pull request, and every gate runs again. At most two repairs by default; after that, a person takes over.
08Live
Standard parts
Every app starts from the factory template with the solved problems already in: sign-in, tenants and roles, legal pages, layout. Built once, hardened in production, never rebuilt.
09Live
The factory library at every step
When a workstep plan is approved, each workstep comes with the standard parts the design chose. Worksteps that touch the database or other sensitive areas are built with the library’s security and database guidelines, and the build record lists which ones and why.
10Live
Release to live
Publishing a release deploys a hosted app to production: the database migrations first, in order, stopping at the first error; then the build. The release shows Live only once the live address serves it.
11Live
An honest state
Until everything in scope is released, a project reads “Building — 3 of 6 worksteps shipped”, and “Live” only after that. A new app shows visitors “Coming soon” and its signed-in users the build steps; a “What’s in the app” page lists the parts it came with, what has been built and what is still to come.
12Live
On the record
Every build job, every release deploy and every change that reached the main branch outside the gates is recorded. Our operator actions go to an append-only audit log.
13Live
Scoped keys, EU hosting
For apps we host, each build gets a short-lived token for that one repository, wiped when the build ends. Your model keys stay with your PP Orchestrator. Cloud instances run in Germany (EU).
“Live” means shipped in a Product Printer release and running on our managed instances. A station moves from coming to live only once its release is there.
The workshop era was beautiful. The factory era is affordable.
— Cut the noise.
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