Minions are Stripe’s homegrown coding agents, responsible for more than a thousand pull requests merged each week. Though humans review the code, minions write it from start to finish. Learn how they work, and how we built them.

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Stripe has built homegrown coding agents called Minions that autonomously produce over a thousand pull requests per week with no human-written code. Starting from a Slack message and ending in a CI-passing PR, Minions run in isolated devboxes, use a forked version of Block's Goose agent, connect to 400+ internal MCP tools via a central server called Toolshed, and follow the same linting and testing pipelines as human engineers. The system is designed for Stripe's unique constraints: a massive Ruby/Sorbet codebase, proprietary internal libraries, and high-stakes financial infrastructure. Key design choices include pre-warmed devboxes, conditional agent rule files, local fast feedback before CI, and a maximum of two CI rounds to balance speed and correctness.

Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agents

<p>I wonder how Stripe’s software engineers feel about this way of working and what their days are like; I hope they’ll write an article about it too.</p>
