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Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agents
- embedding-shape 8mo agoSubmitted five times so far: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=true&query=Minions&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... Once with substantial discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557 (127 points | 2 days ago | 65 comments)
- jongjong 8mo agoUnfortunately, I don't use Stripe products because they discriminated against me by blocking my account because my project used a Blockchain (which I built myself) as an authentication mechanism. It's discrimination because Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs... Why is it so that less intelligent people who believe that there is a man in the sky watching over them have protection against discrimination but I don't? Yet my beliefs are grounded in science and an actual understanding of our socio-economic system. I deserve more protection, not less! Does the law require that one's beliefs be irrational in order to benefit from discrimination protections?
- vbs_redlof 8mo agoYou were building on Tempo, and they deplatformed you?
- jongjong 8mo agoNo. My Blockchain had nothing to do with payments. The Blockchain is for authentication (protection from fake accounts) and tokens represented credits and licensing rights within the platform. The token wasn't even listed on any marketplace.
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoBased on the above article about thousands of AI written PRs littering their code base, you might replace “unfortunately” with “fortunately.”
- yieldcrv 8mo ago“Banks are afraid of only two things: regulators and their wives, and they’re more afraid of their wives than the regulators” I would retroactively make that quote gender neutral but they're really not afraid of their husbands. Financial institutions feel like blockchains don’t have a clear chronology of KYC/AML, they dont care about KYC/AML they care about violating it for their relationship with the regulator.
- jongjong 8mo agoI switched to a different, smaller payment provider. It was pretty easy to switch. No problems at all there. I wonder why I even wanted to use Stripe in the first place. You'd think with their size they wouldn't have to fear regulators. These big companies usually have all the regulators in their pocket.
- yieldcrv 8mo agoStripe is right in the middle Smaller institutions take risks with a niche, and gun for exceptions with the regulators that bigger institutions dont find worthwhile to bother with And the biggest institutions dgaf because their relationship with the national government will never be broken
- xnxkxkkxxk 8mo ago[dead]
- greazy 8mo ago> Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs. What are your religious beliefs? I'm intrigued to hear more.
- jongjong 8mo agoI believe the monetary system is broken and creates asymmetric monetary playing fields based on distance from monetary injection points (banks and governments). The tax system makes it hard for each unit of currency to travel far from a 'money printer'. After just 6 hops, a dollar is taxed down to about 10 cents; so people who are more than 6 hops from a money printer live in a much more scarce monetary environment than people who are in the front row. It's Cantillon effects on steroids. It means that the entire economy has become a kind of social climbing game to get closer to the money printers. I feel that this game is immoral and people shouldn't be forced to participate. Private currencies should be protected by law. I essentially believe that the economy is fake. That people get money due to mostly social factors and then make up plausible narratives to explain their success in a way which omits all the critical social elements... And these explanations sound plausible to people in their social circle who are at a similar distance from a money printer so the false beliefs and perceptive distortions are socially validated. I also believe I'm being persecuted and algorithms are suppressing me for seeing through the scheme and for my ability to explain complex issues simply.
- ericyd 8mo agoThis is different than a belief system protected by anti discrimination laws
- lelanthran 8mo agoThat sounds like a belief, but not necessarily a religious belief.
- jongjong 8mo agoWhy not? There is a ceremonial aspect to it whereby I frequently comment on social media and news sites to preach my gospel. Also, I believe the people at the top are the devil so you could argue there is an overlap with mainstream religion.
- mangoman 8mo agoThere’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.” I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…
- firtoz 8mo agoIf they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- toyg 8mo agoLaw, spirit of the law, common decency. Rare currency these days, I know...
- jMyles 8mo ago> If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile software to murder people for profit, but that's just obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it complies with license agreements.
- Hasnep 8mo agoIf you put up a sign on your house saying "businesses, feel free to come use my driveway for whatever you want" and McDonald's sets up a restaurant there then you won't have much sympathy from me.
- amelius 8mo agoWho came up with the idea to slowly change the color of selected text? A minion?
- ColinEberhardt 8mo agoThe same minion that came up with the cute effect that covers your screen with the word DEVELOPERS, when you scroll to the end of an article?
- maximinus_thrax 8mo ago> The Leverage team builds surprisingly delightful internal products that Stripes can leverage to supercharge their productivity. Why does this sound so insufferable?
- iLoveOncall 8mo agoI can't think of a less ergonomic way to submit a task than to write a huge Slack message with links and references everywhere. This really puts the final nail in the coffin that was the legend that Slack developers trigger a minion from their phone during their commute. It's also funny that they mention they used goose [1] as a starting point. I discovered them at a conference, and quickly realized that nobody was using that crap, to the point that literally every testimony on their website is from their own team. [1] https://github.com/block/goose https://github.com/block/goose
- dist-epoch 8mo agoThe best camera is the camera you have on you. Smartphones have terrible camera ergonomics, yet they killed the compact dedicated camera.
- crimsonnoodle58 8mo agoI've thought about implementing the same at our company. Something that iterates through all our tickets, one shots them and creates PRs. But humans are still left to review the code in the end, and as a developer, code reviewing is one of my least favourite things.. I'm not sure I could spend the rest of my career just reviewing code, and never writing it. And I'm not sure my team would either. They would go insane. As developers, by nature, we are creative. We like to solve problems. Thats why we do what we do each day. We get a thrill when we solve the problem, test it and it actually works. When we see it in production and users enjoying it. When we see the CPU usage go from 99% to 5%. I fear we are soon becoming nothing more than the last validation step between AI and reality. And once AI becomes reality, which is very soon, the days of development as we knew it will be over.
- throwatdem12311 8mo agoOne thing I don’t see developers talking about much is that if your job is to only read code instead of writing it, how do you expect to stay good at reviewing code if you never write it? I only speak for me but when I review code I need to dig into my own experience writing and and remember what works and what doesn’t that I’ve internalized over years of writing and manually debugging code. Take that out of the equation and I wouldn’t be good at reviewing code for long. I used to write a lot of C++ back in the day, and I can still read it and understand it for the most part but I would never be able to effectively review anything non-trivial. I just don’t have enough recent experience writing it myself to have internalized all of the obscure pitfalls and gotchas. And just vommitting out some C++ from a bot and just having it redo things until it has the appearance of working correctly isn’t gonna help me with that. “My job now is just reviewing code” is such an extremey short-sighted view I’m terrified for the future where nobody understands anything anymore. I’m sure OpenAI and Anthropic would love this though. And yeah, reviewing code is one of the more tedious and unfun parts of the job why would I want this? One of the most annoying parts of my job is my supervisor who used to be a dev but became a manager years ago. He doesn’t really understand the codebase enough anymore and I spend so much explaining basic things to him now it actually hinders our productivity when he wants to “contribute”. And let me just say that getting a Claude sub for the whole team hasn’t helped this at all. And one last thing - every single engineer I know that needs to maintain a Stripe integration hates them with the power of a million suns.
- MarcLore 8mo ago[dead]
- OneMorePerson 8mo agoDoesn't delegating make this a lot more possible? You can fire off a request to a sub-agent, they respond with some predictable status that you can parse, and then you continue (you being the "main" agent), so the context window can remain relatively small. Kinda like how a human does it.
- torginus 8mo agoMy experiments using a more hands off approach of prompting claude code have always resulted in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back play, where the agent clearly did some good stuff, but did some other stuff in a somewhat undesirable manner, which subsequently needed correcting. This usually results in A: creating commits where tons of code is being constantly added and removed, B: due to Claude's somewhat cavalier attitude to existing code, has steadily eroded my familiarity with the code base. I'm still not convinced that these longer loops are that beneficial, compared to 1min prompts to 5-10min AI work.
- devonkelley 8mo agoThe add/remove churn is the thing nobody talks about enough. We track net lines changed vs gross lines changed as a ratio and it's genuinely horrifying sometimes. An agent will touch 400 lines to net 30 lines of actual progress. And the worst part is the removed code was often fine, the agent just decided to refactor something it didn't need to touch while it was in there. Shorter, tighter loops with clearer scope boundaries have helped us more than any orchestration improvement.
- torginus 8mo agoThe most horrible thing I have seen with AI in coding is that it tends to add vestigial bits of code for no reason - this or that class that nobody uses at no point in the commit history, or stuff that gets added, then we decide to implement the feature in a different way, but parts of the old implementation stick around.
- oakpond 8mo agoHardly anything substantial about how well this works in practice. It's a hiring ad.
- xnx 8mo ago> It's a hiring ad. And also a project to pad someone's resume.
- alembic_fumes 8mo ago> 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. I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop.
- lelanthran 8mo ago>> 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 > I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop. I'm skeptical that the human-in-the-loop, whose only task is to read code, is going to be able to review at the rate that the AI can produce. It's Undefined Behaviour, now in every language.
- ramon156 8mo agoStripe has become a weird company on my opinion. I'm glad Mollie is an option that does not force me into certain technical choices.
- ericyd 8mo agoThousands of PRs a week generated by AI and requiring human review sounds like a ton, I wonder what their PR merge rate was before this?
- rco8786 8mo agoStripe has somewhere around 3000-3500 engineers on staff, so it's less than one PR a week spread across the org.
- ericyd 8mo agoThanks, I realized after I wrote it that the size of their staff was really the variable I was missing. Agreed that's not a remarkably high rate with such a large engineering org.
- yellow_lead 8mo ago> The Leverage team builds surprisingly delightful internal products that Stripes can leverage to supercharge their productivity. The Leverage team kind of sounds like the Department of Government Efficiency
- maximinus_thrax 8mo agoI don't think so, I think it's Stripe's version on an internal tooling team, what I found to be called DevEx/Core Engineering/Dev Productivity/EngProd/Engineering Excellence in companies I worked at. This team seems to be called Leverage. I would've called it Fulcrum. Or Turbo. Or Spinach (like in Popeye).
- iepathos 8mo ago"1000 PRs/week" with no breakdown of complexity or value is a vanity metric. If these are mostly migrations, boilerplate, and bug fixes on previous Minion PRs that were bug ridden, then you've just created 1000 code reviews/week to waste human time rubber-stamping. That's not productivity, that's busywork with extra steps. It's like measuring productivity by how many people you pull into meetings each week. The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual literally recommends holding as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible. The CIA should add "open as many PRs with AI as possible" to their list. Bonus sabotage points if the PRs are made from ambiguous "one-shot" attempts described in Slack with no follow up clarification.
- xomiachuna 8mo agoI'm sorry, but the "it's not X it's Y" is making me flinch. But otherwise I agree - its a denial of service toolkit, hard to imagine a more effective way to sabotage an engineering effort even if you tried. One can even put a tinfoil hat and argue that this is actually done deliberately. My bet is on human stupidity, tho.
- tracerbulletx 8mo agoThis is what happens when you create an environment where every staff engineer believes they need to show impact with AI to protect their career and act like they're experts in it even though they are learning how best to use AI at exactly the same time as every senior and jr engineer at their company and probably actually know just as much as a random hobbyist in university about what works well.
- derwiki 8mo agoA bunch of people needed to make Geocities sites before we got to Gmail
- jamestimmins 8mo agoThe responses to this are wild. I have worked with and built smaller systems like this and it is an incredible speed up. So much reflexive hate against a genuinely transformative tech. Yes AI has annoying people and grifters, but it is genuinely incredible at some things and finding out how to use it effectively within a company is the most fun I’ve had in my career.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoRelated: Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]