Factory launches Droid 1.0: programmatic tool calling by default, hundreds of tool calls per model request, leads native harnesses on its own Terminal-Bench 4 runs
AI coding agent company Factory announced Droid 1.0 on X and its blog at 22:31 UTC on Oct 29, calling it the largest update yet to its agent harness. The key change makes programmatic tool calling (PTC) the default: the model writes a JavaScript program that runs up to hundreds of tool calls in a sandbox in one model request. In Factorys own Terminal-Bench 4 runs, Droid scored 57.6% with GPT-6.1 Sol ($0.79 per passed task) and 65.2% with Claude Opus 5.5 ($4.73), ahead of Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode and Devin on the same models.
Key Takeaways
- Programmatic tool calling is now the default: the model writes JavaScript that runs in a sandbox with no file, network or system access of its own, making up to hundreds of tool calls per request, with independent calls run concurrently
- Factory example: moving and verifying 151 Linear issues took 312 tool calls; direct calls needed about 36 requests and 3.1M input tokens, a Script needed 2 requests and 61K tokens
- Terminal-Bench 4 (Factory runs, Oct 23-28, three trials per task): with GPT-6.1 Sol, Droid 57.6% vs Codex 54.0%, OpenCode 51.0%, Devin 45.0%; with Opus 5.5, Droid 65.2% vs Cursor and OpenCode 62.1%, Devin 59.6%, Claude Code 57.6%
- The first request shrank from 20,887 to 13,055 tokens (-37%) and up-front tool definitions went from 11 to 2; newly loaded MCP tools are appended to keep the prompt cache intact, and a typical production request reads 98% of input from cache
- Available now as a macOS and Windows desktop app, a terminal UI and the Droid SDK (@factory/droid-sdk); the benchmarks are vendor-run with no third-party reproduction yet
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