How Stripe deploys 1,300 AI-written PRs per week

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:* 1. How Stripe’s “minions” write 1,300 pull requests per week with minimal human intervention 2. Why a good developer experience for humans creates better outcomes for AI agents 3. The critical role of cloud development environments in unlocking AI-powered engineering velocity 4. The machine payment protocol that lets AI agents spend money to accomplish tasks 5. The code review strategy for handling thousands of agent-written PRs 6. Why non-engineers at Stripe are starting to use minions to ship code 7. The future of software businesses built primarily for agent consumers *Brought to you by:* Optimizely—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams: https://www.optimizely.com/howIAI Rippling—Stop wasting time on admin tasks, build your startup faster: https://rippling.com/howiai *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to Steve (02:39) Stripe’s minions and their effect on Stripe as a whole (04:42) Why activation energy matters more than execution (05:44) What is a minion? The technical architecture (06:52) Demo: Activating a minion from Slack with an emoji (09:04) Why good developer experience benefits both humans and agents (11:22) Walking through the agent loop and system prompts (13:42) Why Stripe chose Goose as their agent harness (16:00) The role of Stripe’s developer productivity team (17:15) Why cloud env