Runbook · Multi-agent software factory

Building software with a team of AI agents: installing ChatDev 2.0 and passing a full-lifecycle smoke test

For a while now I've wanted to break out of the closed ecosystems I write code in every day — OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex, Anthropic's Claude and Claude Code. The reason is simple: the free, openly available models have been closing the gap with the $20-a-month subscription tiers so quickly that paying for a walled garden increasingly feels like a habit rather than a necessity. That instinct was sharpened by Bill Gurley's July 2026 Washington Post opinion piece — Gurley, president and founder of the P3 Institute and a former venture capitalist, argues that the flood of powerful models being given away for free is not a security threat but ordinary competition: the oldest strategy in software, cost leadership, driving price down toward the near-zero cost of copying a model. It is, in the essay's words, simply "what competition looks like." Convinced that the open side is where the momentum now lies, I went hunting for a serious free-model toolchain to build real software with — and ChatDev is the most promising thing I found.