Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2

How is this already #1 on the front page with 12 upvotes and 9 comments…

The article doesn’t reveal much. It feels like a fluff piece, and I can’t comprehend what the goal of sharing “we use AI agents” means for the dev community, with little to no examples to share. For a “dev” micro blog, this feels very lackluster. Maybe the Minion could have helped with the technical docs?

EDIT: slightly adjusts tinfoil hat minutes later it’s at #6

Stripe had invested a lot in dev experience over the years precisely because of how "unique" some of the technology choices were: Mongo and originally normal Ruby for a system that mainly deals with money? Without a massive test suite, letting a normal dev make changes without a lot of rails is asking for a sea of incidents. If I recall correctly, the parallelization needed to run the unit tests for developers used to make the cost of continuous integration higher than the cost of the rest of the ec2 instances. Add the dev boxes, as trying to put a useful test environment in a laptop became unreasonable, and they already start with a pile of guardrails tooling that other companies never even needed. A hassle for years, but now a boon, as the guardrails help the LLMs.

It'd be nice to get an old school, stripey blog post, the kind that has a bit less fluff, and is mostly the data you'd all have put in the footnotes of the shipped email. Something that actually talks about the difficulties, instead of non-replicable generalities. After all, if one looks at the stock price, it's not as if competitors are being all that competitive lately, and I don't think it's mainly the details of the AI that make a difference. It'd also be nice to hear what goes one when not just babysitting minions, if there's actually anything else a dev is doing nowadays. AI adoption has changed the day to day experience within the industry, as most managers don't seem to know which way is up. So just explaining what days look like today might even sell as a recruiting initiative.

When the norm on HF daily papes is a pdf, a website, & a git, corp. thinkpieces like this are going to have to work a lot harder to get any meaningful engagement and onward corp word-of-mouth. like i now think stripe has fallen a but, where before they were tier...

this is the risk you run putting out subpar content in a world where the norms and appetites shift daily. slightly unfair? yes, as stripe has never been one to shine in the "corp infra open source" category tho; Which is crazy because it doesn't reflect the ridiculous talent they have internally.

> Since MCP is a common language for all agents at Stripe, not just minions, we built a central internal MCP server called Toolshed, which hosts more than 400 MCP tools spanning internal systems and SaaS platforms we use at Stripe.

Are there ecisting open source solutions for such a toolshed?

This is a devops post. They just brag about the plumbing.

Dark secret of dark factory is high quality human input, which takes time and focus to draft up, otherwise human will end up multiple shot it, and read thru the transcript to tune the input.

Where is the detail? Examples? Something concrete? I don't think it is, but it does read like LLM generated content marketing. Lots of generic statements everyone knows. Yes, dev environments are helpful. Have been for 20 years. Yes, context and rules are important for agents. Surprise.

TLDR "look we use AI at Stripe too, come work here"

Are any companies doing this sharing the code being produced or some example Pull Requests? I am wondering if a lot of the human review is substantive or rubber stamping - as we see with long Pull Requests from humans. I know I would half-ass a review of a PR containing lots of robot code. I assume stripe has higher standards than me but would be nice to see some real world examples.

is there a way to visualize what your agents are doing? I'm adding a bunch of debug code to the claude agent sdk, but it's a bit overwhelming to read at some time , but I just want to see visually what how it does all the tools calling, what files it reads etc…

I'm sure there are lots of Stripe engineers that cruise the comments here. Anyone care to provide some color on how this is actually working? It's not a secret that agents can produce tons and tons of code on their own. But is this code being shipped? Maintained? Reviewed?

What's the deal with `Devboxes`? is this a common thing? Sounds very clunky for regular (human-driven) development.

Hey can they ask their coding agents to support 3D secure, so I can pay with EU emitted credit cards on the few US sites I'm interested in?

Either one should drop Stripe due to vibe coding or this is just a marketing favor to other VC AI companies to boost AI in general.

Good to see we're vibe coding critical financial infrastructure. Progress is being made.

Next up: let's vibe code a pacemaker.

Why they is so many 404. Linked to mp3 ?! What was this feature ?