Stripe's top engineers are producing 10x as much as they did in 2024
The term '10x engineer' is an overused cliche in the world of tech startups and scaleups, but thanks to AI tools, they might become a lot more common. In a video released by Anthropic last week, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison revealed that some engineers at Stripe are producing literally ten times as much as the average engineer was producing a few years ago.
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"I was speaking with one engineer at Stripe this morning, and over the course of H1 he had more than 600 pull requests [changes to a codebase] merged," Collison said. "Every one of them was written with AI." This equates to 23 'PRs' per week. In 2024, Stripe made a total of 1,145 pull requests per day, equivalent to 2.3 per developer per week.
Stripe's AI usage has had a tangible impact on hiring. Collison said that the fintech has seen "at least 6x speed up" on certain projects; managers used to ask for additional staff when completing a project but can now do it three times as fast with half the amount of people using agents. Despite smaller teams, Collison said that "quality per pull request over the last 18 months has gone up" too.
Stripe said in a blog post earlier this year that it merges 1,300 PRs per week which are written entirely by 'Minions', the firm's in-house agentic coding tools. It's not clear what proportion of total PRs are done agentically; during this year's Stripe Sessions, Collison said that, in 2025, the fintech produced "well over a thousand production pull requests per day," suggesting that at least three fifths of PRs at Stripe still have human involvement.
Implementing AI has not been faultless. Collison said that "incidents per unit time" was also up, but that those incidents were "very minor" and that the firm's prior investment into reliability infrastructure has meant that "total reliability is essentially unchanged." Stripe said in 2024 that it checks each change to the codebase over one million times, and makes a total of over "six billion test runs each day." Collison said Stripe has also been implementing guardrails around sensitive data since 2017 which "kind of accidentally put us in a better position when agentic development came along."
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