alt Hacker NewsMinions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents – Stripe Dot Dev Blog
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Submitted five times so far: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...
Once with substantial discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557 (127 points | 2 days ago | 65 comments)
This is what happens when you create an environment where every staff engineer believes they need to show impact with AI to protect their career and act like they're experts in it even though they are learning how best to use AI at exactly the same time as every senior and jr engineer at their company and probably actually know just as much as a random hobbyist in university about what works well.
"1000 PRs/week" with no breakdown of complexity or value is a vanity metric. If these are mostly migrations, boilerplate, and bug fixes on previous Minion PRs that were bug ridden, then you've just created 1000 code reviews/week to waste human time rubber-stamping. That's not productivity, that's busywork with extra steps.
It's like measuring productivity by how many people you pull into meetings each week. The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual literally recommends holding as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible. The CIA should add "open as many PRs with AI as possible" to their list. Bonus sabotage points if the PRs are made from ambiguous "one-shot" attempts described in Slack with no follow up clarification.
I've thought about implementing the same at our company. Something that iterates through all our tickets, one shots them and creates PRs.
But humans are still left to review the code in the end, and as a developer, code reviewing is one of my least favourite things..
I'm not sure I could spend the rest of my career just reviewing code, and never writing it. And I'm not sure my team would either. They would go insane.
As developers, by nature, we are creative. We like to solve problems. Thats why we do what we do each day. We get a thrill when we solve the problem, test it and it actually works. When we see it in production and users enjoying it. When we see the CPU usage go from 99% to 5%.
I fear we are soon becoming nothing more than the last validation step between AI and reality. And once AI becomes reality, which is very soon, the days of development as we knew it will be over.
> The Leverage team builds surprisingly delightful internal products that Stripes can leverage to supercharge their productivity.
The Leverage team kind of sounds like the Department of Government Efficiency
Hardly anything substantial about how well this works in practice. It's a hiring ad.
The emphasis on one-shot execution is interesting. Most agent frameworks still rely on iterative loops with human checkpoints, but Stripe's approach of giving the agent a complete context dump upfront and letting it run seems closer to how senior engineers actually work - you read the whole PR/spec first, then write the code. The tricky part is always the context window: once your codebase exceeds what fits in context, one-shot falls apart and you're back to chunked reasoning. Curious if they hit that wall and how they handle repo-scale tasks.
Stripe has become a weird company on my opinion. I'm glad Mollie is an option that does not force me into certain technical choices.
> Over a thousand pull requests merged each week at Stripe are completely minion-produced, and while they’re human-reviewed, they contain no human-written code.
I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop.
Thousands of PRs a week generated by AI and requiring human review sounds like a ton, I wonder what their PR merge rate was before this?
Who came up with the idea to slowly change the color of selected text? A minion?
I can't think of a less ergonomic way to submit a task than to write a huge Slack message with links and references everywhere.
This really puts the final nail in the coffin that was the legend that Slack developers trigger a minion from their phone during their commute.
It's also funny that they mention they used goose [1] as a starting point. I discovered them at a conference, and quickly realized that nobody was using that crap, to the point that literally every testimony on their website is from their own team.
> The Leverage team builds surprisingly delightful internal products that Stripes can leverage to supercharge their productivity.
Why does this sound so insufferable?
Unfortunately, I don't use Stripe products because they discriminated against me by blocking my account because my project used a Blockchain (which I built myself) as an authentication mechanism.
It's discrimination because Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs... Why is it so that less intelligent people who believe that there is a man in the sky watching over them have protection against discrimination but I don't? Yet my beliefs are grounded in science and an actual understanding of our socio-economic system. I deserve more protection, not less!
Does the law require that one's beliefs be irrational in order to benefit from discrimination protections?
There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.”
I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…