Navan drew it on paper first. He always drew things on paper first. The mechanical pencil and the ruled notebook were his thinking tools, the place where ideas became visible before they became permanent.
The architecture diagram started as a sketch during a long Saturday afternoon. Navan had been trying to explain the factory to a friend—a designer, not an engineer—and had realized that no single document captured the complete picture. The factory.strongdm.ai site described the methodology. The repos contained the implementations. The blog post provided the narrative. But nowhere was there a single image that showed how everything connected.
He started with Attractor at the top. The pipeline runner. The thing that orchestrated everything else. DOT-based directed graphs defining the flow of work. Below Attractor, the agents: Claude, Codex, Gemini. Interchangeable, pluggable through the CodergenBackend interface. The agents received specifications from above and produced code that flowed downward.
In the middle tier, the supporting infrastructure. CXDB storing context—the Turn DAG holding every conversation, every branch, every decision point. Leash wrapping each agent in a container, monitoring syscalls, enforcing Cedar policies. Agate managing the convergence loop: GOAL.md to Interview to Design to Sprint Planning to Implementation to Assessment, cycling until satisfaction was achieved.
At the bottom, the Digital Twin Universe. Behavioral clones of Okta, Jira, Slack, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Sheets. Self-contained binaries replicating APIs and edge cases. The testing surface that the entire factory validated against. Thousands of scenarios running through these twins, producing the satisfaction metrics that flowed back up to the top.
The arrows made it beautiful. Not beautiful in the decorative sense, but beautiful in the structural sense, the way a well-designed bridge is beautiful. Everything connected to everything else in exactly the right way. Specifications flowed down. Satisfaction flowed up. Context spread laterally through CXDB. Containment wrapped horizontally through Leash. The arrows formed a circulatory system.
Navan transferred the sketch to a digital format. He used clean lines, consistent spacing, a muted color palette. He labeled every component. He drew the arrows with care, ensuring each one told you what flowed along it: specs, code, metrics, context, policies.
He printed it on a single poster-sized sheet and hung it in the office.
Jay stood in front of it for a full minute without speaking. Then: "That's the factory."
"That's the factory," Navan agreed.
Justin studied it more slowly, tracing the arrows with his finger. "This should go on the website," he said. "People need to see this. They need to understand that it's not one tool. It's a system."
"Attractor at the top," Jay said. "Agents in the middle. Twins at the bottom."
"Specs down, satisfaction up," Navan added.
Justin nodded. "That's the whole thing on one page."
The poster stayed on the wall. Visitors saw it first when they entered. It became the factory's icon, the image that represented the methodology in every presentation, every blog post, every conference slide. One diagram. One page. Everything connected.
"Specs down, satisfaction up." That's the entire factory in four words. The diagram sounds like the kind of artifact that makes a complex system suddenly comprehensible. Every architecture deserves a poster.