October 3, 2026
Legacy tests help AI agents: Minions use millions of Stripe tests
Stripe deployed Minions in environments it had prepared for engineers long before LLM agents arrived.
Gergely Orosz
@gergelyorosz
Among the medium and large companies I follow, some of those that have integrated AI most deeply into their work had dedicated infrastructure platform and developer platform teams even before AI. These companies have always had well-established developer tooling and software delivery processes. Now AI tools can use many existing layers of validation. Startups beginning from scratch will eventually have to build all these systems: automated testing, manual testing, feature flags, canary releases, observability, experiments, migrations, and much more.
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By Feb 19, 2026, Stripe was reporting 1,300 merged PRs per week written by Minions and reviewed by humans. In the first article in the series, the company put the figure at 1,000. The agents work in prepared environments with repositories and warmed caches that start in 10 seconds.
Gergely Orosz sees a similar pattern among medium and large companies: those that invested early in developer tooling and software delivery are making greater use of AI. Startups beginning from scratch still have to build these systems.
The checks were already there. Stripe previously used its suite of more than 3 million tests for development by engineers. Now Minions receive results from the same tests and fix the code. Before pushing, the agent also runs the existing lint checks as a separate programmatic step, without calling an LLM.
After the first CI run, Minions get one more attempt to fix errors. After the second push and CI run, the company hands the branch to a human for review.
The foundation is available separately. Stripe built Minions on the open-source goose. According to the official documentation as of Oct 3, 2026, goose is installed with `curl -fsSL https://github.com/aaif-goose/goose/releases/download/stable/download_cli.sh | bash`. Users then select an LLM provider and model in `goose configure`, and `goose session` starts an agent session.
Through its shared MCP server Toolshed, Stripe provides nearly 500 tools to hundreds of internal agents, and every added tool becomes available to all of them.