# Factory AI — Droid 1.0: Building a Frontier Harness

- Company: Factory AI (factory.com)
- Announced: 2026-10-29
- Category: developer-tool-release
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://factory.com/news/frontier-harness
- Record: https://forck.live/items/29605-droid-1-0-building-a-frontier-harness
- Subject: Droid

Factory is releasing Droid 1.0, an update to its agent harness that it says is more accurate, efficient and faster than before, aimed at enterprise coding work. The company says Droid outperforms the native harnesses built for their models by up to 20% more efficiently on the same tasks. On Terminal-Bench 4 with GPT-6.1 Sol, Factory says Droid scores 3.5 points higher than Codex at 12% lower cost, and 6.6 to 12.6 points higher than OpenCode and Devin. With Claude Opus 5.5, it says Droid scores 3.0 to 7.6 points higher than Cursor, OpenCode, Devin and Claude Code, at up to 24% lower cost. The largest change is programmatic tool calling, now the default: the agent writes a JavaScript program that invokes tools in a sandbox with no file, network or system access of its own. Factory says this keeps context clean, cuts model requests and makes checks run deterministically in code, and that a Script can make hundreds of tool calls in one model request.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://factory.com/news/frontier-harness:

> Over the past year, we have worked with hundreds of thousands of developers across some of the largest enterprises in the world. Working side by side with these teams, we've built and hardened a frontier agent harness that directly meets the demands of enterprise development: high-quality results on complex tasks, efficient use of resources, and strong safety controls.
> 
> Today, we introduce Droid 1.0: more accurate, efficient, and faster than ever before, powered by new design principles and a programmatic tool-calling engine.
> 
> Droid is our agent harness. An agent harness is everything around the model: the prompts, the tools, how tool results come back, and the loop that runs it all. Agents now work for hours or days across hundreds of turns, and every turn re-sends instructions, tools, and history.
> 
> Today's update to Droid is the largest one yet. On the same tasks, Droid outperforms the native harnesses built for their models up to 20% more efficiently. It's also designed for what comes next: when frontier models can plan whole workflows as code, Droid lets them run hundreds of tool calls in a single model request.
> 
> Factory is model-independent by design.

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