A coding agent doesn't decide your architecture — it inherits it. The invariants it inherits are what keep the output safe, and they're decided before the agent writes a line, not during.
The promise of coding agents is "describe it, ship it." The reality is that an agent without decided invariants will happily produce code that works today and breaks the architecture tomorrow. The scaffold is the safety layer.
First Principles: What an Agent Can't Decide
An agent can write code. It cannot, reliably, decide your auth model, your data layer, your CI, or your error path — at least not the way you'd want them decided once and reused forever. Those are invariants: decisions you make once so every agent run inherits them.
- Auth flow: decided once, inherited everywhere.
- Data fetching and error paths: the same.
- CI and tests: the contract the agent must not break.
Design the Invariants Once
The Templates carry the same invariants across all seven stacks — only the stack changes. That's the design decision: the invariants are the product, and the stack is the variable. An agent that inherits decided invariants produces code that fits the architecture instead of inventing one.
Why This Matters More Than the Prompt
Teams obsess over prompt quality and ignore the scaffold. The scaffold is the higher-leverage lever: a great prompt against a blank repo produces a great first commit and a broken second one. A decent prompt against a template produces consistent commits across the whole project.
Who It's For
FACTA Templates are for the operator who wants invariants decided before the agent writes a line — four people, one archetype, working in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or OpenCode. Not for teams who want the agent to invent the architecture.
Conclusion
Coding agents inherit invariants; they don't decide them. Decide the invariants once — in the template — and every agent run inherits a safe architecture instead of inventing one.
About FACTA
FACTA helps startups and growth-stage teams turn AI into production systems that keep running — not demos that impress once.
We design the architecture around the parts that actually break under real usage: tooling you own, credentials you control, failover, cost controls, observability. The boring infrastructure that keeps a system alive after launch.
Led by Matías Baglieri and Carolina Fogliato, we focus on one thing:
AI leadership that builds. Not just advises.
Stop letting your agent re-decide auth and CI every run.
Copy a template with the invariants baked in. See the greenfield tax for the cost of not doing it.
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