Stripe is the company I usually hold up as the exemplar of polished internal tools. Hopefully this is taken the right way and I don't want to be negative towards the teams working on this, but I see a distinct lack of polish in these tools and presentations. Some examples:
- Unnecessary AI copy throughout the interfaces like "Browse, discover, and manage skils for your agents", "No favorites yet — hover a card and click the star to pin it here", "One execution environment, shared across agents". These instantly read as AI copy and decrease my enthusiasm.
- Inconsistent, AI-sloppy look-and-feel with different typefaces spattered across the interface
- The session metrics slide looks busy and AI-generated. It repeats 360,014 sessions in one of the cells at the top, but also has a "360K sessions" in the heading
I don't know if I'm the only one that notices this stuff, or whether others see it too.
They have published a bunch of stuff about their internal tools in the past. Look up https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home and compare it to this, as an example.
It's always possible that in reality they were always a bit less polished behind the scenes though.
Very cool demonstration of managed agents built for the needs of their own business.
I think this is where a lot of companies are going to go: on-prem platforms that give various teams access to agents that are as powerful as coding agents, but much more managed and governed.
It's very close to the direction we're taking for windmill.dev, we call it "operator builders" rather than focus on "knowledge graph" which the article is very light on details of.
What I'm mostly reading is a developer platform and runtime where users can build agents that can run tools and for that you need a secure code runtime, ACL/permissions, easy way to build apps or what cloudflare OS call gadgets. We're betting on this too at https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, very curious to see if that's the future for most enterprise and if a model where everyone vibe-code/fork cloudflare OS to their enterprise need is the future, or a more exhaustive/enterprise platform like ours does.
I read a buzz word "Knowledge AI Platform" but I did not see any specific feature helpful for knowledge management like verification or transparency. It is more like any generic Agent builder. Maybe it meant to justify building something internally.
I think that’s because none of them go past “I’ve set up agents to be orchestrated this way” and that’s about as impressive as “look at my cloudformation template”.
Ahhh I built an internal set of agents to run our company (finances, all info in the karpathy-style LLMWiki and a database of clients, contracts, billing, time tracking, all managed by MCPs, etc) and it's also called Kai (company name is Kaizen)
TIL people still fall for eh I mean use Langchain. Sorry, low value comment; I don’t know how to do that differently; it is such bad garbage since day one and strangely it did not improve. Sorry anyway for the comment, at least it was not LLM generated?
It (and most other systems) abstract the wrong concepts when you want to create an agent. They promote what was likely never a great strategy but even parsimoniously what are strategies that were good ideas months or a year back.
For example how langchain or whatever else handles subagents and deep research is laughable even today.
So whats the recommendation? Just use pydantic and code everything up yourself. Maybe strands I dont know.
Which specific strategies do you think are outdated, and what would you recommend instead? This sounds more like a criticism of older versions of LangChain than its current APIs. The post also uses deepagents, a separate package in the same ecosystem. Is there something in the current implementation of either that you’re referring to?
The fact that Stripe are touting a production product that (at face value) benefits their business seems to suggest that maybe crap is subjective and as ever, being overly opinionated in an emerging space might actually be a blocking mindset rather than a positive one.
It's a lot of sugar and high level abstractions on top of existing things, I find using the existing things not that complicated or difficult and I struggle to see the value on using the framework as it doesn't sit well with my way of abstracting the stack.
Somewhat interesting how the design of Stripe's developer-focused landing pages used to be the "cream of the crop," so to speak, but now they just look like Claude run amok. I wonder if the web design "skills" for Claude, and other LLMs, were overly trained on Stripe.
Size and scale, I would think. An out of the box solution probably doesn't quite have the same capabilities as something they can (and now have to) manage in it's entirety.
Stripe probably WANTS to be opinionated about how their company works with the tools.
- Unnecessary AI copy throughout the interfaces like "Browse, discover, and manage skils for your agents", "No favorites yet — hover a card and click the star to pin it here", "One execution environment, shared across agents". These instantly read as AI copy and decrease my enthusiasm.
- Inconsistent, AI-sloppy look-and-feel with different typefaces spattered across the interface
- The session metrics slide looks busy and AI-generated. It repeats 360,014 sessions in one of the cells at the top, but also has a "360K sessions" in the heading
I don't know if I'm the only one that notices this stuff, or whether others see it too.
unless you work there how would you know this?
It's always possible that in reality they were always a bit less polished behind the scenes though.
I think this is where a lot of companies are going to go: on-prem platforms that give various teams access to agents that are as powerful as coding agents, but much more managed and governed.
I'm betting on this with my open source project, Lightspeed: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/lightspeed
By force or by choice?
What I'm mostly reading is a developer platform and runtime where users can build agents that can run tools and for that you need a secure code runtime, ACL/permissions, easy way to build apps or what cloudflare OS call gadgets. We're betting on this too at https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, very curious to see if that's the future for most enterprise and if a model where everyone vibe-code/fork cloudflare OS to their enterprise need is the future, or a more exhaustive/enterprise platform like ours does.
I think that’s because none of them go past “I’ve set up agents to be orchestrated this way” and that’s about as impressive as “look at my cloudformation template”.
Happy to be in such good company!
For example how langchain or whatever else handles subagents and deep research is laughable even today.
So whats the recommendation? Just use pydantic and code everything up yourself. Maybe strands I dont know.
I use Apache Burr but it's not as good as LangChain. I just don't want to use software whose website has a pricing page if it's not a SAAS.
seems every company that has spare engineering resource all builds such thing internally
> No existing tool could handle the data security requirements and specific workflows Stripe needed
Stripe probably WANTS to be opinionated about how their company works with the tools.
Spotify built some nonsense like this too and made ridiculous claims that it saves 90 percent of tokens. I guess anything goes these days.