[HN Gopher] Minions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents...
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Minions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents - Stripe Dot
Dev Blog
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 65 points
Date : 2026-02-22 12:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stripe.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (stripe.dev)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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)
| jongjong wrote:
| 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?
| vbs_redlof wrote:
| You were building on Tempo, and they deplatformed you?
| jongjong wrote:
| No. My Blockchain had nothing to do with payments. The
| Blockchain is for authentication (protection from fake
| accounts) and tokens represented credits and licensing rights
| within the platform. The token wasn't even listed on any
| marketplace.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Based on the above article about thousands of AI written PRs
| littering their code base, you might replace "unfortunately"
| with "fortunately."
| yieldcrv wrote:
| "Banks are afraid of only two things: regulators and their
| wives, and they're more afraid of their wives than the
| regulators"
|
| I would retroactively make that quote gender neutral but
| they're really not afraid of their husbands.
|
| Financial institutions feel like blockchains don't have a clear
| chronology of KYC/AML, they dont care about KYC/AML they care
| about violating it for their relationship with the regulator.
| jongjong wrote:
| I switched to a different, smaller payment provider. It was
| pretty easy to switch. No problems at all there. I wonder why
| I even wanted to use Stripe in the first place. You'd think
| with their size they wouldn't have to fear regulators. These
| big companies usually have all the regulators in their
| pocket.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Stripe is right in the middle
|
| Smaller institutions take risks with a niche, and gun for
| exceptions with the regulators that bigger institutions
| dont find worthwhile to bother with
|
| And the biggest institutions dgaf because their
| relationship with the national government will never be
| broken
| greazy wrote:
| > Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs.
|
| What are your religious beliefs? I'm intrigued to hear more.
| jongjong wrote:
| I believe the monetary system is broken and creates
| asymmetric monetary playing fields based on distance from
| monetary injection points (banks and governments). The tax
| system makes it hard for each unit of currency to travel far
| from a 'money printer'. After just 6 hops, a dollar is taxed
| down to about 10 cents; so people who are more than 6 hops
| from a money printer live in a much more scarce monetary
| environment than people who are in the front row. It's
| Cantillon effects on steroids. It means that the entire
| economy has become a kind of social climbing game to get
| closer to the money printers. I feel that this game is
| immoral and people shouldn't be forced to participate.
| Private currencies should be protected by law.
|
| I essentially believe that the economy is fake. That people
| get money due to mostly social factors and then make up
| plausible narratives to explain their success in a way which
| omits all the critical social elements... And these
| explanations sound plausible to people in their social circle
| who are at a similar distance from a money printer so the
| false beliefs and perceptive distortions are socially
| validated.
|
| I also believe I'm being persecuted and algorithms are
| suppressing me for seeing through the scheme and for my
| ability to explain complex issues simply.
| mangoman wrote:
| 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...
| firtoz wrote:
| If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm
| struggling to understand why it's off putting
| toyg wrote:
| Law, spirit of the law, common decency. Rare currency these
| days, I know...
| jMyles wrote:
| > If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm
| struggling to understand why it's off putting
|
| What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and
| bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project
| is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and
| peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile
| software to murder people for profit, but that's just
| obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it
| complies with license agreements.
| Hasnep wrote:
| If you put up a sign on your house saying "businesses, feel
| free to come use my driveway for whatever you want" and
| McDonald's sets up a restaurant there then you won't have
| much sympathy from me.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| You don't have to agree that it's off-putting, but if you're
| "struggling to understand why" that demonstrates a serious
| lack of empathy and awareness of social dynamics.
| dkersten wrote:
| Just because it's legal and allowed doesn't mean it's not off
| putting.
|
| Personally, I have no issue with them making their own
| internal fork, but then blogging about their thing without
| contributing it back leaves a little bad taste. If it's so
| good, then contribute it back, since they benefited from the
| volunteers.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You can't have it both ways. As a library author choose MIT
| to encourage commercial usage because companies are afraid
| of GPL, but then complain that companies are actually using
| it in a MIT license way without contributing back.
| thn-gap wrote:
| License it GPL, and it will be fed to a model as training
| data to recreate it copyright free anyways.
| orangecoffee wrote:
| Training falls outside of copyright concerns because of
| fair use, so proprietary or free is orthogonal. This is
| how the world is currently trending.
| unfunco wrote:
| ...and you can get almost identical features by simply
| installing the GitHub app inside Slack, and then asking Copilot
| to work on something, this should take < 5m to set up for any
| organisation using Slack and GitHub.
| Hasnep wrote:
| Welcome to the free software movement!
| oytis wrote:
| Copyleft license would not help if they are only using it
| internally
| post-it wrote:
| AGPL would
| nkohari wrote:
| I don't have specific information about Minions, but I do know
| about Stripe's architecture and internal tooling.
|
| The article isn't really talking about changes they made to
| goose, it's describing how they went about integrating goose
| with the rest of their developer infrastructure (ie. the AWS-
| based remote devbox system, Toolshed, etc).
| jcims wrote:
| I don't know enough about either but if their approach was to
| make it substantially more opinionated, which is likely in the
| case of an org that's subject to audits, it would make sense to
| keep it separate.
| nigger238 wrote:
| You should always expect this when you make MIT. When you give
| every company permission to fork your software, make it
| proprietary, and sue you for copying or reverse engineering it,
| don't be surprised when they do exactly that. It's in their
| best interest, after all.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| How would they contribute back when their fork is a
| customization of how it works?
|
| > We've customized the orchestration flow in an opinionated way
| to interleave agent loops and deterministic code
|
| Is goose in such disrepair that you can just drop code changes
| into it and the smol developer auto-accepts it, happy that
| anyone is doing the work?
|
| Or is goose actually it's own project with 250 issues and 74
| PRs and might have its own ideas about how it's built?
| surajrmal wrote:
| They seem to have just optimized its integration with their
| existing tooling and workflows. That doesn't sound largely
| useful to the broader community. It's also probably different
| enough from goose at this point that rebranding it makes sense.
| I do think such integrations are hugely important for
| productivity and usefulness of this sort of tool. It seems like
| the post is advocating for doing deep 1p integration to further
| improve the utility of coding agents.
| amelius wrote:
| Who came up with the idea to slowly change the color of selected
| text? A minion?
| ColinEberhardt wrote:
| The same minion that came up with the cute effect that covers
| your screen with the word DEVELOPERS, when you scroll to the
| end of an article?
| amelius wrote:
| I didn't read that far. Reminds me of Steve Ballmer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
|
| Was this video part of the training set?
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > The Leverage team builds surprisingly delightful internal
| products that Stripes can leverage to supercharge their
| productivity.
|
| Why does this sound so insufferable?
| gassi wrote:
| _Sparkling DevEx_
| zdragnar wrote:
| None of the adjectives are literal, aside from "internal".
|
| The whole thing is meant to play on your emotions, not convince
| your mind.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://github.com/block/goose
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The best camera is the camera you have on you.
|
| Smartphones have terrible camera ergonomics, yet they killed
| the compact dedicated camera.
| crimsonnoodle58 wrote:
| 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.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| One thing I don't see developers talking about much is that if
| your job is to only read code instead of writing it, how do you
| expect to stay good at reviewing code if you never write it?
|
| I only speak for me but when I review code I need to dig into
| my own experience writing and and remember what works and what
| doesn't that I've internalized over years of writing and
| manually debugging code. Take that out of the equation and I
| wouldn't be good at reviewing code for long.
|
| I used to write a lot of C++ back in the day, and I can still
| read it and understand it for the most part but I would never
| be able to effectively review anything non-trivial. I just
| don't have enough recent experience writing it myself to have
| internalized all of the obscure pitfalls and gotchas. And just
| vommitting out some C++ from a bot and just having it redo
| things until it has the appearance of working correctly isn't
| gonna help me with that.
|
| "My job now is just reviewing code" is such an extremey short-
| sighted view I'm terrified for the future where nobody
| understands anything anymore. I'm sure OpenAI and Anthropic
| would love this though.
|
| And yeah, reviewing code is one of the more tedious and unfun
| parts of the job why would I want this?
|
| One of the most annoying parts of my job is my supervisor who
| used to be a dev but became a manager years ago. He doesn't
| really understand the codebase enough anymore and I spend so
| much explaining basic things to him now it actually hinders our
| productivity when he wants to "contribute". And let me just say
| that getting a Claude sub for the whole team hasn't helped this
| _at all_.
|
| And one last thing - every single engineer I know that needs to
| maintain a Stripe integration hates them with the power of a
| million suns.
| caseyohara wrote:
| I reckon the developers most excited about AI & agents never
| got the same thrill or satisfaction that you do. Those
| developers are plainly motivated by different things, and
| that's okay.
| MarcLore wrote:
| 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.
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| Doesn't delegating make this a lot more possible? You can fire
| off a request to a sub-agent, they respond with some
| predictable status that you can parse, and then you continue
| (you being the "main" agent), so the context window can remain
| relatively small. Kinda like how a human does it.
| torginus wrote:
| My experiments using a more hands off approach of prompting
| claude code have always resulted in a two-steps-forward-one-
| step-back play, where the agent clearly did some good stuff,
| but did some other stuff in a somewhat undesirable manner,
| which subsequently needed correcting.
|
| This usually results in A: creating commits where tons of code
| is being constantly added and removed, B: due to Claude's
| somewhat cavalier attitude to existing code, has steadily
| eroded my familiarity with the code base.
|
| I'm still not convinced that these longer loops are that
| beneficial, compared to 1min prompts to 5-10min AI work.
| oakpond wrote:
| Hardly anything substantial about how well this works in
| practice. It's a hiring ad.
| xnx wrote:
| > It's a hiring ad.
|
| And also a project to pad someone's resume.
| alembic_fumes wrote:
| > 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| I'm skeptical that the human-in-the-loop, whose only task is to
| read code, is going to be able to review at the rate that the
| AI can produce.
|
| It's Undefined Behaviour, now in _every_ language.
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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.
| ericyd wrote:
| 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?
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > 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
| iepathos wrote:
| "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.
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