Stripe Minions, which execute one-shot agent-driven PRs without iteration, now produce roughly 30% of Stripe's weekly pull requests — a trajectory that points toward the future of software development.
Will details Stripe Minions — an internal tool where agents receive a single prompt, build the feature, run CI/CD, and submit a PR for human review without iteration — growing from 1,200 PRs/week to 7,000 in just months, now constituting ~30% of all Stripe PRs. ✦ AI generated
Will Gaybrick · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 14:36
“How do you guys ship so much product?”
So we created something called Stripe Minions, which we've blogged about a little bit. And, you know, of course, we've got tons of developer tooling to help users iterate with agents, but minions, we think of as, you know, the most — like one of our most important metrics internally is how many PRs and what percentage of our PRs are created by minions. And the reason for that is that minions are one shot. So you give it a prompt and you know it's going to build it and then it's going to go through CI/CD and all of testing and then you're going to review it. So you're not going to iterate, not go into planning mode. You're just going to say this is what I want, go do it. And so we think, you know, that's kind of where the world is going. They were doing 1,200 PRs per week. And last week, I think 7,000 PRs came from minions. And about 30% of our PRs in that week came from Minions.
verbatim transcript · starts at 14:36
14:36we've blogged about a little bit. And, you know, of course, we've got tons of developer tooling to help users iterate with agents, but minions, uh, we think of as, you know, the most like one of our most important metrics internally is how many PRs and what percentage of our PRs are created by minions. And the reason for that is that minions are one shot. >> Yeah. So you you give it a prompt and
15:02you know it's going to build it and then it's going to you know go through CI/CD and all of testing and then you're going to review it. So you're not going to iterate not go into planning mode. You're just going to say this is what I want go do it. >> And so we think you know that's kind of where the world is going. You know it's
15:18the the oneshot or the glorified real loop where you're just letting the agent be super super powerful. And so we blogged about Minions, I think in January, February, and they were doing 1,200, you know, PRs per week. And last week, I think 7,000 PRs came from minions. Wow. >> Yeah. And and about 30% of our PRs in that week came from Minions. So, >> you know, that sort of developer tooling
15:45and then the internal processes just get out of the way and make the tools amazing. And that's how we're going to go fast. >> That's amazing. In terms of empowering senior engineers who are now more powerful than ever, have you made any dramatic changes to how you organize the company internally? So, obviously that the minions example is incredible and I assume the 30% is going to go to a very
16:08high percentage within a year or something. Um, but some of the things that we've heard from other companies is taking your most powerful engineers, putting them into business units or closer to the customers. Um but then you have sort of coordination problems that come from that. So like how have you guys approached that empowerment? >> Yeah. So engineers have always been you know some of the most important product
- ·Stripe Minions execute one-shot agent-driven PRs
- ·No iteration or planning mode required
- ·Agent builds, runs CI/CD, submits for review
- ·Minions weekly PRs: ~30% of all Stripe PRs
- ·One-shot model is the future of dev tooling