How Stripe built “minions”—AI coding agents that ship 1,300 PRs weekly from Slack reactions | Steve Kaliski (Stripe engineer)

About this episode

Steve Kaliski discusses how Stripe's AI coding agents, known as 'minions', automate the process of shipping pull requests and enhance developer productivity.

Steve Kaliski is a software engineer at Stripe who has spent the past six and a half years building developer tools and payment infrastructure. He’s part of the team that created “minions”—Stripe’s internal AI coding agents, which now ship approximately 1,300 pull requests per week with minimal human intervention beyond code review. In this episode, Steve demonstrates how Stripe engineers activate development work from Slack and leverage cloud-based development environments for parallel agent workflows, and demos machine-to-machine payments where AI agents transact autonomously with third-party services. What you’ll learn: How Stripe’s “minions” write 1,300 pull requests per week with minimal human intervention Why a good developer experience for humans creates better outcomes for AI agents The critical role of cloud development environments in unlocking AI-powered engineering velocity The machine payment protocol that lets AI agents spend money to accomplish tasks The code review strategy for handling thousands of agent-written PRs Why non-engineers at Stripe are starting to use minions to ship code The future of software businesses built primarily for agent consumers — Brought…

People in this episode

Host: Claire Vo

Guest: Steve Kaliski

Topics covered

• AI coding agents
• developer tools
• cloud development environments
• machine payments
• software engineering
• pull requests

Keywords

• Stripe
• AI agents
• pull requests
• cloud environments
• developer experience
• machine payments
• code review

Sponsors

Optimizely, Rippling

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Stripe

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