Overview

Frankie is the Software Factory — a specialized, long-running coding agent that runs on APEX. You hand it a pull request that carries a plan or spec, and Frankie drives that PR to green, review-clean, and self-verified: implemented, lint/build passing, CI green, reviewer comments addressed — then it stops and hands off to a human to merge.

Humans define the plan. Frankie implements the work, drives CI to green, and hands the result back for review.

What Frankie does

• Meets a PR wherever it is — implement from a plan, finish a partial PR, or act as a reviewer on a complete-but-red PR.
• Runs a durable 7-stage pipeline that survives pod restarts (state persisted to BigQuery, resumed via orphan-reclaim).
• Fixes actionable CI failures and code-review findings automatically, and re-pushes until it's ready.
• Never merges and never flips draft → ready-for-review — both are always a human action.

At a glance

Built on	APEX runtime (dispatcher → BigQuery queue → worker pod)
Pipeline	7 stages · durable resume
Watch TTL	6h (configurable) · max 10 iterations
Merges	0 — human only
Kill switch	FRANKIE_ENABLED

The tool surface

Your coding agent stays the planner and conversational interface; the Frankie MCP handles explicit factory operations. The label is the API; the conversation is the interface. The current surface:

frankie_handover, frankie_finish, frankie_update, frankie_status, frankie_thinking, frankie_takeover, frankie_cancel, frankie_preflight, frankie_feedback, and frankie_help (the self-describing entrypoint).

Where to go next

• Getting started — connect the Frankie MCP and hand over your first PR.
• Architecture — the dispatcher, queue, worker, and 7-stage pipeline.
• FAQ — what to hand over, labels, troubleshooting.

Track all runs in the Apex Console, and reach the team in #swat-factory.