Towards an AI Software Factory for Data Systems

AI-assisted coding tools deliver significant acceleration of coding, but only limited impact across the end-to-end software development lifecycle (SDLC)--an Amdahl's law effect! In this paper, we discuss our progress towards building an AI SW Factory that accelerates all the stages of SDLC-Targeting, Coding, Reviewing, and Ops. The AI SW Factory produces a metadata exhaust that enables self-improvement by fine-tuning model weights and updating our World Model (a rich data substrate). We focus on Data Systems and the important class of Evolutionary Coding Tasks (i.e., those with a measurable objective to hill-climb) and report on 1) scaled deployments at Microsoft (tens of repositories) leading to 3x engineering efficiency above agentic coding and up to 22x token efficiency, and 2) several open challenges.