Shep Walker

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."