Unfortunately, I don't use Stripe products because they discriminated against me by blocking my account because my project used a Blockchain (which I built myself) as an authentication mechanism.
It's discrimination because Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs... Why is it so that less intelligent people who believe that there is a man in the sky watching over them have protection against discrimination but I don't? Yet my beliefs are grounded in science and an actual understanding of our socio-economic system. I deserve more protection, not less!
Does the law require that one's beliefs be irrational in order to benefit from discrimination protections?
“Banks are afraid of only two things: regulators and their wives, and they’re more afraid of their wives than the regulators”
I would retroactively make that quote gender neutral but they're really not afraid of their husbands.
Financial institutions feel like blockchains don’t have a clear chronology of KYC/AML, they dont care about KYC/AML they care about violating it for their relationship with the regulator.
There’s something off-putting about making a blog post about some splashy tech that’s is a fork of an open source project, and that tech not also being open source? It reads to me like “Hey, we thought the open source goose project was just okay, so we forked it to do it better. But we’re not going to contribute it back to and instead rename it.”
I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…
…and you can get almost identical features by simply installing the GitHub app inside Slack, and then asking Copilot to work on something, this should take < 5m to set up for any organisation using Slack and GitHub.
I don't have specific information about Minions, but I do know about Stripe's architecture and internal tooling.
The article isn't really talking about changes they made to goose, it's describing how they went about integrating goose with the rest of their developer infrastructure (ie. the AWS-based remote devbox system, Toolshed, etc).
I don’t know enough about either but if their approach was to make it substantially more opinionated, which is likely in the case of an org that’s subject to audits, it would make sense to keep it separate.
They seem to have just optimized its integration with their existing tooling and workflows. That doesn't sound largely useful to the broader community. It's also probably different enough from goose at this point that rebranding it makes sense. I do think such integrations are hugely important for productivity and usefulness of this sort of tool. It seems like the post is advocating for doing deep 1p integration to further improve the utility of coding agents.
The elephant in that room is that all these LLM's were trained on boatloads of open source software that they can remix enough to not violate any copyrights.
As an open source contributor, in some ways this makes me much more frustrated than someone making a closed source fork of a BSD licensed project.
I can't think of a less ergonomic way to submit a task than to write a huge Slack message with links and references everywhere.
This really puts the final nail in the coffin that was the legend that Slack developers trigger a minion from their phone during their commute.
It's also funny that they mention they used goose [1] as a starting point. I discovered them at a conference, and quickly realized that nobody was using that crap, to the point that literally every testimony on their website is from their own team.
I've thought about implementing the same at our company. Something that iterates through all our tickets, one shots them and creates PRs.
But humans are still left to review the code in the end, and as a developer, code reviewing is one of my least favourite things..
I'm not sure I could spend the rest of my career just reviewing code, and never writing it. And I'm not sure my team would either. They would go insane.
As developers, by nature, we are creative. We like to solve problems. Thats why we do what we do each day. We get a thrill when we solve the problem, test it and it actually works. When we see it in production and users enjoying it. When we see the CPU usage go from 99% to 5%.
I fear we are soon becoming nothing more than the last validation step between AI and reality. And once AI becomes reality, which is very soon, the days of development as we knew it will be over.
> Over a thousand pull requests merged each week at Stripe are completely minion-produced, and while they’re human-reviewed, they contain no human-written code.
I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop.
"1000 PRs/week" with no breakdown of complexity or value is a vanity metric. If these are mostly migrations, boilerplate, and bug fixes on previous Minion PRs that were bug ridden, then you've just created 1000 code reviews/week to waste human time rubber-stamping. That's not productivity, that's busywork with extra steps.
It's like measuring productivity by how many people you pull into meetings each week. The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual literally recommends holding as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible. The CIA should add "open as many PRs with AI as possible" to their list. Bonus sabotage points if the PRs are made from ambiguous "one-shot" attempts described in Slack with no follow up clarification.
This is what happens when you create an environment where every staff engineer believes they need to show impact with AI to protect their career and act like they're experts in it even though they are learning how best to use AI at exactly the same time as every senior and jr engineer at their company and probably actually know just as much as a random hobbyist in university about what works well.
The responses to this are wild. I have worked with and built smaller systems like this and it is an incredible speed up.
So much reflexive hate against a genuinely transformative tech. Yes AI has annoying people and grifters, but it is genuinely incredible at some things and finding out how to use it effectively within a company is the most fun I’ve had in my career.
32 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadOnce with substantial discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557 (127 points | 2 days ago | 65 comments)
It's discrimination because Blockchain tech is part of my religious beliefs... Why is it so that less intelligent people who believe that there is a man in the sky watching over them have protection against discrimination but I don't? Yet my beliefs are grounded in science and an actual understanding of our socio-economic system. I deserve more protection, not less!
Does the law require that one's beliefs be irrational in order to benefit from discrimination protections?
I would retroactively make that quote gender neutral but they're really not afraid of their husbands.
Financial institutions feel like blockchains don’t have a clear chronology of KYC/AML, they dont care about KYC/AML they care about violating it for their relationship with the regulator.
What are your religious beliefs? I'm intrigued to hear more.
I think it probably wouldn’t be as weird if the project were a meaningfully different fork of it, but it sounds like it’s trying to accomplish the same goals as the open source project which I feel should probably be ported back? and renaming it seems sorta ungrateful? Kinda like that “you made this? I made this” meme. Maybe I just don’t have an understanding of how different the projects are though…
The article isn't really talking about changes they made to goose, it's describing how they went about integrating goose with the rest of their developer infrastructure (ie. the AWS-based remote devbox system, Toolshed, etc).
> We’ve customized the orchestration flow in an opinionated way to interleave agent loops and deterministic code
Is goose in such disrepair that you can just drop code changes into it and the smol developer auto-accepts it, happy that anyone is doing the work?
Or is goose actually it's own project with 250 issues and 74 PRs and might have its own ideas about how it's built?
As an open source contributor, in some ways this makes me much more frustrated than someone making a closed source fork of a BSD licensed project.
Why does this sound so insufferable?
This really puts the final nail in the coffin that was the legend that Slack developers trigger a minion from their phone during their commute.
It's also funny that they mention they used goose [1] as a starting point. I discovered them at a conference, and quickly realized that nobody was using that crap, to the point that literally every testimony on their website is from their own team.
[1] https://github.com/block/goose
But humans are still left to review the code in the end, and as a developer, code reviewing is one of my least favourite things..
I'm not sure I could spend the rest of my career just reviewing code, and never writing it. And I'm not sure my team would either. They would go insane.
As developers, by nature, we are creative. We like to solve problems. Thats why we do what we do each day. We get a thrill when we solve the problem, test it and it actually works. When we see it in production and users enjoying it. When we see the CPU usage go from 99% to 5%.
I fear we are soon becoming nothing more than the last validation step between AI and reality. And once AI becomes reality, which is very soon, the days of development as we knew it will be over.
I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop.
The Leverage team kind of sounds like the Department of Government Efficiency
It's like measuring productivity by how many people you pull into meetings each week. The CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual literally recommends holding as many meetings as possible with as many people as possible. The CIA should add "open as many PRs with AI as possible" to their list. Bonus sabotage points if the PRs are made from ambiguous "one-shot" attempts described in Slack with no follow up clarification.
So much reflexive hate against a genuinely transformative tech. Yes AI has annoying people and grifters, but it is genuinely incredible at some things and finding out how to use it effectively within a company is the most fun I’ve had in my career.
Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086557