stripe.dev
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Across the industry, agentic coding has gone from new and exciting to table stakes, and as underlying models continue to improve, unattended coding agents have gone from possibility to reality.
Minions are Stripe’s homegrown coding agents. They’re fully unattended and built to one-shot tasks. 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.
Our developers can still plan and collaborate with agents such as Claude and Cursor, but in a world where one of our most constrained resources is developer attention, unattended agents allow for parallelization of tasks.
A typical minion run starts in a Slack message and ends in a pull request which passes CI and is ready for human review, with no interaction in between. We frequently see engineers spinning up multiple minions in parallel, to enable them to parallelize the completion of many different tasks. This can be particularly helpful during an on-call rotation to effectively resolve many small issues that might arise.
In the first part of this blog post miniseries, we’ll show you how our engineers use minions and what they can do. In Part 2, we’ll dive into the implementation under the hood and how we built them.
