February 22, 2026
Send in the code gremlins
Minions: Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents – Stripe Dot Dev Blog
Stripe’s “Minions” write code on their own — devs clap, others call it cringe
TLDR: Stripe unveiled “Minions,” bots that turn Slack requests into ready-to-review code, claiming 1,000+ bot PRs weekly. The crowd split: builders love the productivity boost, while critics dunked on the branding and asked why a purported open-source fork isn’t open, sparking a lively, very online debate.
Stripe just dropped “Minions,” their in-house code-writing bots that start from a Slack message and end with a ready-to-review pull request. They claim over a thousand bot-made code changes land each week, with humans reviewing but not writing the code. Cue the internet audience: half impressed, half side-eyeing the branding and the bragging. On Hacker News, the hottest thread isn’t “how does it work?” but “should we be cheering?”
The sharpest jab? Accusations that Stripe hyped something built on a fork of open source without open-sourcing it back. One commenter summed up the vibe as: cool demo, closed door. Another eye-roll went to the corporate tone — that “Leverage team” line drew instant cringe points for sounding like buzzword salad. And then there’s the UI snark: someone roasted the slowly-changing highlight color in the screenshots with, “A minion did this?”
Meanwhile, the practical crowd is intrigued: unattended bots fixing flaky tests and shipping small fixes in parallel? Yes please. But the thread also veered into drama when one user alleged Stripe blocked their account over a blockchain-based login, spinning into a personal crusade — the room mostly backed away from that energy. Bottom line: Minions look powerful, the marketing rubbed some folks wrong, and the open-source question won’t die.
Key Points
- •Stripe’s Minions are fully unattended, one-shot coding agents that generate over 1,000 merged pull requests weekly, with human review but no human-written code.
- •A typical Minion run starts from Slack and ends with a CI-passing pull request ready for review, enabling engineers to parallelize many small tasks, especially during on-call.
- •Stripe built Minions in-house due to its massive Ruby/Sorbet codebase, unique internal libraries, and high-stakes production environment processing over $1 trillion annually.
- •Minions are tightly integrated with Stripe’s developer tooling (source control, environments, code generation, CI) and can be invoked via CLI, web, Slack, and internal apps.
- •CI systems can trigger workflows such as flaky-test tickets that prompt users to launch a Minion to fix issues, with agents using Slack thread context when invoked.