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 <a href="https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home" rel="nofollow">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.
It's possibly a cost benefit thing. Moving quickly with AI leaves blood splatter, but if you get enough in return you decide it's worth it anyway.
Stripe has already existed for a while, and has gone through ups and downs. There was a period where customer experience was first, and the systems inside were built fast and in rather cavalier ways (See Greg Brockman famously telling everyone in a MongoDB convention about using Mongo's oplog as a queue). There were times where internal tools teams could spend all the time they needed to get about as much shine internally as the external facing websites were. Huge investments in everything. But there's just so much churn, as some staff burns out, and others realize that they have so much vested stock that continuing in such a high intensity environment is pointless, that whatever Stripe might have been during your tenure might be very different from other people's, and you can both be right.
I worked at stripe too. Sail design system at time was exemplary. A ton of effort got invested in little details. They spent an insane effort in making ruby fast with their own jit, formatter and type checker they built.
I think it has more to do with the fact that Stripe has already 'won' in a lot of ways, and the company has now basically transitioned from the innovative tech startup phase to the MBA/marketing/bureaucracy phase. Quality, efficiency as priorities are replaced with marketing and 'strategy'...
quadrifoliate · · focus · HN ↗
- 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.
anthonypasq · · focus · HN ↗
unless you work there how would you know this?
quadrifoliate · · focus · HN ↗
It's always possible that in reality they were always a bit less polished behind the scenes though.
away0g · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
edlebert · · focus · HN ↗
aleqs · · focus · HN ↗
hibikir · · focus · HN ↗
nojvek · · focus · HN ↗
Post AI, I think the bar hasn’t been the same.
aleqs · · focus · HN ↗