FactoryAI's Droids Achieve Top Ranking on Terminal Bench, Signaling New Era in AI Software Development

FactoryAI has announced that its AI-powered software development agents, known as Droids, have secured the number one position on the rigorous Terminal Bench benchmark. This achievement signals a significant shift in the landscape of AI-driven software engineering, prompting prominent AI investor and Lore.com founder Nathan Lands to declare, "The Claude Code era is DONE. The Droid era has begun." The company also recently closed a $50 million Series B funding round, underscoring investor confidence in its agent-native approach.

Droids are specialized AI assistants engineered to automate a wide range of software development tasks, including feature development, refactoring, incident response, migrations, code review, and documentation. FactoryAI emphasizes their ability to integrate seamlessly into existing developer workflows across various interfaces like IDEs, CLIs, Slack, and Linear. This agent-native design allows Droids to operate with comprehensive organizational context, similar to a human engineer.

Terminal Bench is an open-source benchmark designed to assess AI agents' proficiency in handling complex, end-to-end tasks within a terminal environment. It features 80 human-verified tasks that demand advanced reasoning, environmental exploration, and robust solution validation across diverse categories, from coding to system administration. FactoryAI's Droid achieved a score of 58.8% on this benchmark, surpassing other leading agents and models, including those utilizing Claude and GPT-5.

The company's success on Terminal Bench highlights that agent design, rather than solely the underlying large language model, is a decisive factor in performance. FactoryAI's technical report details innovations such as hierarchical prompting strategies, model-specific optimizations, and minimalist tool design principles that contribute to Droids' superior capabilities. This performance is particularly notable as Droids can leverage various LLMs, demonstrating an agnostic approach to model providers.

With the recent $50 million Series B funding from investors like NEA, Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, and J.P. Morgan, FactoryAI is poised to further expand Droids' capabilities. The company's mission is to bring autonomy to software engineering, enabling developers to delegate complex tasks and focus on higher-level design and architecture. This move is expected to accelerate feature delivery, reduce migration times, and enhance code quality across the industry.