Your AI Agents Shouldn't Care Where They Run - Nikhil Harithas, Factory

Nikhil Harithas

Talks worth your time · AI in business · 2026-11-04 · 17 min · 8 pages

Agents can't keep borrowing your identity and running on someone else's machines, especially at banks and other heavily regulated companies. Nikhil Harithas of Factory shows how they rebuilt their coding agent, Droid, to run on any compute inside a customer's own cloud. He covers the compute gateway and relay design, bring-your-own-key model calls, snapshots and forking, and why they plan to open source the layer. 0:00 Intro 1:09 Customers where none of the defaults worked 2:44 Agents can't keep borrowing your identity 4:26 Bring your own compute 5:42 Control plane, compute gateway and relay 9:34 Bring your own key and staying in your VPC 11:21 Open sourcing the compute layer 12:24 Snapshots, forking and drivers 14:22 The hard parts of managing compute 16:44 Agents shouldn't care where they run Nikhil Harithas, Factory: https://factory.ai Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!

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