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

At server landing about 1,300 PRs that have no human assistance besides review per week. A lot of where our work begins is it could be in a Google Doc as we're planning a new feature, or maybe a GR ticket comes in, or we're talking about something in Slack. I can click an emoji, and then the menu will sort of attempt to one shot resolving that prompt using all the tools that are available at Stripe. When you're in larger organizations, there's so much friction that can come between a good idea and getting it into the world. Not only can I have one of these, but I could have many, many of these running in parallel in isolated environments, making isolated changes all at the same time? How are you getting all this code review done? Whether the text has been written by Steve or the text has been written by Steve's robot, you still want that CI environment that's providing confidence that the code that's being changed is safe and that as it rolls out, we're having blue green deployment so you can roll back to. All that is super critical independent of the nature of the authoring of it. No matter how juiced these laptops are, you get three or four work trees in and, like, it starts to sound like an airplane taking off. It's no good. And so I do think on this multithreading agentic engineering work, cloud environments and virtual environments are so important to unlock velocity. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Steve Kaliski, a software engineer at Stripe, and he's gonna show us how the Stripe team deploys a bunch of pinions to do their engineering work. We'll also watch an agent spend a little bit over $5 to plan a birthday party all in Claude code. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Most marketing teams aren't short on ideas, but what they are short on is time. And that's exactly what Optimizely Opal gives you back. With AI agents that handle real marketing workflows, you know, like creating content and checking compliance, generating experiment variations, personalizing user experiences, analyzing pages for GEO, even tasks like approvals and reporting. It's your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams, plugging seamlessly into the tools you already use, handling the boring busywork, and keeping everything on brand. That leaves marketers with more time to do your actual job. See what Opal can automate for your team by signing up for a free enterprise agentic AI workshop with Optimizely. Find out more at optimizely.com/howiai. Attend live, and you'll get a free pair of Ray Ban Meta AI glasses. Steve, I'm so excited to have you on How I AI because I saw the Stripe minions on the timeline. And one, exceptional …