Factory released Droid 1.0 with programmatic tool calling by default and a 37% smaller base prompt

Archive entry: this covers an event from October 29, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On October 29, 2026, Factory released Droid 1.0, which it called its largest Droid update, in an announcement on the Factory site. Droid 1.0 was available as a macOS and Windows desktop app and as a terminal UI (CLI), and the post was credited to Factory Research.

What changed

• Programmatic tool calling became the default: the model wrote JavaScript that ran in a sandbox and could carry hundreds of tool calls in one request.
• Factory said script mode lowered Claude Opus 5.5 cost by 15% compared with direct tool calls.
• The first-request base prompt fell from 20,887 tokens (Droid 0.170.0) to 13,055 tokens (0.250.0), a 37% cut.
• Median first paint dropped from 1,839 ms to 488 ms between the August 25 and October 20 releases.
• The Droid SDK (@factory/droid-sdk, TypeScript) used the same agent as the CLI.
• Script mode was on by default for models including GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5.5 and Kimi K3.

Terminal-Bench 4 results

On Terminal-Bench 4 (runs from October 23 to 28, 2026), Droid had a pass rate of 57.6% with GPT-6.1 Sol and 65.2% with Claude Opus 5.5, versus 54.0% for Codex with GPT-6.1 Sol and 57.6% for Claude Code with Opus 5.5. The figures came from Factory's own post.

What it meant for builders

Developers comparing coding agents had a model-agnostic harness that, according to Factory, completed more tasks at lower cost than the vendors' own tools. The post did not list plans or prices.

Sources

• Droid 1.0: Building a Frontier Harness (Factory, October 29, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.