The correct response to AI-driven productivity gains is to build more products and grow faster, not to reduce headcount—a Jevons paradox where increased efficiency should lead to expanded output.

12:42have skewed in that direction where they've seen this new, you know, agentic uh efficiency and power as a way to optimize cost structure. Uh you saw some layoffs. You saw, you know, companies shrinking opex. And our belief is that it's just an opportunity to I'm being a little cheeky, but build everything. >> Yes. >> And you know, the best way to optimize your cost structure is to grow more.

13:10>> Yes. you know, we have reams of user asks going back many years that are unmet. And so we just want to get through them all faster. >> And so while we have, you know, more and more productivity from those senior engineers, if you want to ship more and build faster, you have to create founder-like agency inside your company. >> And so the main things that are holding

13:32back our progress today are actually sort of back office things. You know, we are merging so much more code than last year. And it is stressing every system. It is stressing how do we get things into our seller systems? How do we get things onto our pricing page? How do we actually bring things to market when we can't train sellers on them fast enough? And so we are really trying at this

13:53stage to optimize every single phase of we think of it as sort of the critical path in Stripe from you know the ideas behind product development the user asks all the way to products being in users's hands. And so, you know, to your question of how do you go faster, it's really two things. It's one just how do you create that agency for everyone at Stripe? How do you let everyone at

14:14Stripe be an otur like a founder, you know, a a a creative and not have them held back by the morass of, you know, centralized processes overhead. Yeah. Exactly. >> Exactly. And on the other side then it's how do you you know with your de uh your dev prod team just make the tools better and better and better. Um, so we created something called Stripe Minions, which

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