Minions

More than 1,000 agent-written pull requests merge at Stripe every week, a figure Alistair Gray revised to over 1,300 in the second part of his account, published 19 February 2026. The agents are called Minions: an engineer describes a task in a Slack message, the Minion works alone in an isolated cloud environment, produces a pull request with CI passing, and a human reviews it. Nobody writes the code.

The number is readable only through the infrastructure under it. Minions run on a custom fork of goose, the open source coding tool built by Block, with confirmation prompts removed because the devboxes (ephemeral AWS EC2 instances drawn from a pre-warmed pool, available in about 10 seconds) can reach neither production nor user data. Orchestration runs on blueprints, a state machine that mixes deterministic nodes for predictable steps, cloning a repo, creating a branch, with agent nodes for understanding a problem and writing code. Gray calls this putting LLMs in contained boxes. Tooling arrives through Toolshed, an MCP server exposing roughly 500 tools, each agent receiving a curated subset. Feedback lands early: pre-push lint hooks in under a second, then a ceiling of two CI cycles against more than 3 million tests.

One set of rules files serves Minions, Cursor and Claude Code, so every context improvement pays across all three. Bill Staples reaches for Stripe in August 2026 as governance material: an open loop bounded by deterministic software, isolation, and checks that run before the push.