AI Factory and project repositories should be separate by design.

The AI Factory acts as the control plane. It creates workspaces, and each workspace runs its own project harness as an independent process.

Each workspace has an Orchestrator Agent with a chat interface. The user talks to this agent, and it coordinates specialized agents for:

Plan → Critique → Implement → QA → Review

All agents in this workflow communicate over ACP. The Ops Agent is separate from this workflow and manages the harness itself.

The harness stores runtime state such as memory, logs, plans, config, and checkpoints inside the Factory app data.

The actual project directory stays independent and is connected separately through a mount or project connection.

Each workspace also has an Ops Agent that can evolve the project harness, including tools, prompts, policies, workflows, and agent setup.

In short:

Factory = control plane
Workspace = project boundary
Orchestrator = chat interface and workflow controller
Workflow agents = communicate over ACP
Harness = isolated agent runtime
Ops Agent = harness maintainer, outside the ACP workflow
App data = harness state
Project repo = independently connected source code