Shep Walker

e.m. @ stripe working on developer productivity

[Stripe @stripe]

Over 1,300 Stripe pull requests merged each week are completely minion-produced, human-reviewed, but contain no human-written code (up from 1,000 last week).

How we built minions: https://t.co/GazfpFU6L4.

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

Second Minions blog post! Covering:
* strategic investments we've made for devs that have paid huge dividends as we build coding agents.
* agent specific stuff
* And a small metrics update to reflect the growth we've had in the past week 😉
https://t.co/ABuDgByOxY

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@ianmst holy shit this thread is cool

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke do you have a filter on merged commits that determines whether they write to the change log or not?

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke Shh

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

We build out a tool at Stripe called Minons! It makes it super easy for Stripe engineers to kick off async agents, tied into our development infrastructure - enabling us to ship faster and with higher quality.
https://t.co/SaxCwyt0dx

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@TurnerNovak @gaybrick https://t.co/SaxCwyty35

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

very fun conversation where @gaybrick talks about Minions - a tool my team built to accelerate product development with AI agents. more detailed writeup coming soon 👀

[The Peel @ThePeelPod]

I asked @gaybrick how @stripe thinks about build vs buy in AI:

"We are constantly thinking about new ways to empower developers.

We built something cool recently called Minions. Which uses large language models to automate a lot of the run load that’s coming to our product teams.

You click a button in a Jira ticket, and a minion will go off and fix or update the thing. You’ll see the PR, then click a button to approve. And that’s getting a ton of use internally.

For us, build vs buy is dictated by just how strategic something is to the long-term arc of the company.

One of the principles that we think about a lot at Stripe is, what are the non-speculative, forever compounding investment areas? And we think developer productivity is one of those.

You make your developers happier, more productive, that’s just going to make you a better place for engineers to work every year.

And for developer productivity, we often find that our systems are so specific that building on top of them ourselves is a lot more efficient than trying to bolt things on."

[The Peel @ThePeelPod]

I asked @gaybrick how @stripe thinks about build vs buy in AI:

"We are constantly thinking about new ways to empower developers.

We built something cool recently called Minions. Which uses large language models to automate a lot of the run load that’s coming to our product teams.

You click a button in a Jira ticket, and a minion will go off and fix or update the thing. You’ll see the PR, then click a button to approve. And that’s getting a ton of use internally.

For us, build vs buy is dictated by just how strategic something is to the long-term arc of the company.

One of the principles that we think about a lot at Stripe is, what are the non-speculative, forever compounding investment areas? And we think developer productivity is one of those.

You make your developers happier, more productive, that’s just going to make you a better place for engineers to work every year.

And for developer productivity, we often find that our systems are so specific that building on top of them ourselves is a lot more efficient than trying to bolt things on."

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

new default Claude code prompt just dropped

[Justin Duke @jmduke]

a friend piped in the entire text of https://t.co/NOg1IyKziq into Claude Code as a joke and accidentally created the perfect tool

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@RufusPeabody ignorant question: what's the general transferability for professional bettors? like, I'd imagine anything that is modeling+being clever is open, right? finance is obvious but there are no many applications in my world for risk modeling + some hustle.

[Kathy Sun @KathyXSun]

y’all actually finishing your side projects??

As @shepwalker says — the thing i love about ai coding assistants is they let me build half finished side projects at an exponential rate

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

waiting eagerly for the Cosmere EMDR subplot

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@Sourcegraph Thanks for having me! It was fun to come present with y'all.

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

imma play so much factorio here

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

Neva (2024)

[pastel papi @emilyshoots]

a photo i took that feels like a painting

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke spooky buttondown logo when

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke What has this taught you about b2b SaaS sales?

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke Congratulations!!!

[Shep Walker @shepwalker]

@jmduke 'nongreat' is a great metric criterion