wtf is app-factory?

app-factory shares pieces of the system the author uses to turn a one sentence app idea into a shipped iOS app, covering discovery, pricing, design, build, App Store screenshots, and submission. More than 20 apps have gone through the full pipeline, with a dozen live on the App Store. The author is publishing reusable parts of that system one at a time rather than the whole thing, since the full setup is described as too tangled and too specific to their own workflow to be useful to others. The first piece released is a verification gate: a single Python file, standard library only, with no dependencies, that decides whether an AI agent's reported success can actually be trusted. It rejects fabricated passes that lack supporting evidence, checks that cited evidence points to a real, current, non-failing result, and includes 17 built in negative test cases designed to make sure the gate correctly refuses bad input. It also detects when an agent's review loop is stalling instead of making progress, enforces limits on both the number of turns and the spend a loop can use, and tracks whether the checker itself is still working correctly over time. The README documents seven specific techniques behind the gate, each mapped to the exact function in the code that implements it, along with a table connecting common symptoms (like a gate that passes wrong output, or a loop that keeps reporting progress with nothing changing) to their underlying causes and fixes. There is a suggested five step path for building a small version of a similar pipeline yourself, starting with chaining a few bounded steps together and adding one negative test case per check. The repository includes the gate script itself, 23 unit tests, example reports showing valid and invalid cases, an evaluation set template, code snippets from the author's write up, and a roadmap of planned future pieces. It is released under the MIT license, and the author welcomes contributions as long as any new check comes with a negative test case attached.