Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2(stripe.dev) |
Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2(stripe.dev) |
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
Reinventing the wheel without explaining why existing tools didn't work
Creating buzzwords ("blueprints" "devboxes") for concepts that are not novel and already have common terms
Yet they embrace MCP of all things as a transport layer- the one part of the common "agentic" stack that genuinely sucks and needs to be reinvented
However, it is also light on material. I would also like to hear more technical details, they're probably intentionally secretive about it.
But I do, however, understand that building an agent that is highly optimized for your own codebase/process is possible. In fact, I am pretty sure many companies do that but it's not yet in the ether.
Otherwise, one of the most interesting bits from the article was
> Over 1,300 Stripe pull requests (up from 1,000 as of Part 1) merged each week are completely minion-produced, human-reviewed, but containing no human-written code.
Won‘t that be the nee normal with all those AI agents?
No frameworks, no libraries, just let AI create everything from scratch again
Marketting is a major goal of HN after all.
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.
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.
TLDR "look we use AI at Stripe too, come work here"
Are being handling this at all? Is it no longer needed because it gets rolled into AGENTS.md?
Skills are a positive development for task preferences, agents.md for high level context, but a lot of the time its just easier to do things the way your Ai wants.
You see, this is no longer necessary - companies are firing all the non-seniors, are not hiring any juniors, and delegating everything to AI. This is the future apparently!
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.
Are there ecisting open source solutions for such a toolshed?
I could be wrong, but my educated guess is that, like many companies, they have many low hanging fruit tasks that would never make it into a sprint or even somewhat larger tasks that are straight forward to define and implement in isolation.
Edit: also you'll find a pretty common sentiment among US website owners is that the new API that supports 3DS is overcomplicated and they want their 7 lines of code create-a-charge-with-a-token back. Screw the Europeans because they only care about US buyers anyway.
Keeping my subscriptions to Asimov's and Ars Technica is becoming a pain though because ... Stripe I guess. Ars staff even confirmed it.
A Revolut card works fine, local banks' cards deny the charge by default and if you're lucky they call you and ask if they should allow it.
If you have fairly complicated infrastructure it can be way more efficient to have a pool of ready to go beefy EC2 instances on a recent commit of your multi-GB git repo instead of having to run everything on a laptop.
Next up: let's vibe code a pacemaker.
Personally, this is exciting.
Hard to do an exact ROI, but they're probably saving something like $20,000,000+ / year from not having to hire engineers to do this work.
> Cardiologist wins 3rd place at Anthropic's hackathon.
But again: the agent can only move as fast as we can review code.
Financial capital at scale will begin to run circles around labor capital.
"LGTM..."
I feel like code review is already hard and under done the 'velocity' here is only going to make that worse.
I am also curious how this works when the new crop of junior devs do not have the experience enough to review code but are not getting the experience from writing it.
Time will tell I guess.
This is an enormous drawback and makes LLM code review more akin to a linter at the moment.