Case studies
What shipped, with sources.
Vendor blogs restating each other are not sources. A number appears here only when the named organization published it. Unverified talk-circuit figures are omitted, not rounded up.
- Shopify: River, a Slack-native agent on the Aquifer substrate
Shopify built River, an AI agent that only operates in public Slack channels. It reads code, runs tests, opens pull requests, queries the warehouse, and inspects production traces. Underneath, Aquifer is the internal platform (durable session, harness, sandbox, gateway, credentials proxy, observability). The May 2026 engineering post is explicit that the 2024 monorepo-and-Nix work was done so agents would have a substrate.
- Stripe: Internal minions and AI-assisted pull requests
Stripe runs internal coding agents it calls minions. In the Sessions 2026 developer keynote, API design lead Michelle Bu described minions that open production pull requests for human review, alongside a broader rise in AI-assisted PR creation and agent traffic to Stripe’s own documentation.
- StrongDM: A three-person AI team and non-interactive development
StrongDM’s AI team published a first-party account of a “Software Factory” in which humans write specifications and scenarios, and agents write and iterate on code without human-authored patches or human code review. The validation story is scenario satisfaction against a Digital Twin Universe (behavioral clones of Okta, Jira, Slack, and Google Workspace APIs), not a conventional green test suite.
- Uber: Minion, uReview, and the internal agent stack
Uber engineers have described Minion as an internal background-agent platform that takes toil (validation-heavy fixes, cleanup, similar interruptions) and returns a pull request for a human. That description comes from talks by Uber staff, not from an uber.com post named Minion. What Uber has published under its own domain is uReview, a GenAI review system that comments on diffs, plus adjacent tools such as FixrLeak. This page keeps those sources separate.