Stripe has built Minions, fully unattended coding agents that generate over 1,000 pull requests weekly without human-written code. These agents operate entirely autonomously, starting from Slack messages and ending with CI-passing pull requests ready for human review. Engineers can spin up multiple minions in parallel, enabling them to handle numerous tasks simultaneously during busy periods like on-call rotations.

Unlike general-purpose AI coding tools, Minions were built specifically for Stripe's unique environment: hundreds of millions of lines of Ruby code with Sorbet typing, proprietary libraries, and $1 trillion in annual payment volume moving through production. The stakes are high given Stripe's complex dependencies on financial institutions and regulatory requirements. While LLM agents excel at building from scratch, iterating on Stripe's mature, complex codebase requires sophisticated tooling integration.

Minions integrate deeply with Stripe's developer infrastructure, using the same tooling as human engineers. They run in isolated devboxes pre-loaded with Stripe's codebase, use a customized fork of Block's goose agent, and connect to 400+ MCP tools through Stripe's central Toolshed server. The system interleaves agent creativity with deterministic steps like linting and testing, aiming to complete tasks in one shot while providing automated feedback layers to catch issues early.