Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform

- 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.

I am finding the opposite to be true with one of my clients. They explicitly want a new channel. The chat-style UI/UX is vastly preferred over their poorly maintained internal tooling.

I suppose if you are Stripe actual, most things would be well designed and more difficult to abandon. Most places aren't like Stripe.

The hard part is bringing everything that matters to the new channel, but it's certainly feasible to do this. I am doing it right now. We will soon be able to delete hundreds of wildly inconsistent cshtml views and related controllers in favor of a single agent tool that applies json patches. This will easily cover 99.9% of use cases. A manual json editor is retained for the rare case where we need some multi-megabyte merge operation.

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

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.

By force or by choice?

Happy to be in such good company!

seems every company that has spare engineering resource all builds such thing internally

  1. The whole interface feels way too vibe coded with tons of unneeded stuff. Why does it have a console and snake game built in? Why does it have annoying sounds? Why is it full of AI slop writing? The latter is especially confusing because the first person listed under authors is a "Technical Writer". I guess the interface is the general stripe.dev page not exactly related to Kai but the post definitely is pure AI slop writing.
  2. It seems to claim things that might not be substantiated like the following: "When Account Executives use Kai, they produce 2x the sales activity, create 17% more opportunities, generate 26% more revenue opportunities, and close 39% more deals when compared to the same sellers in weeks they don't use it." Correlation is not causation. More engaged, better sales people might just also use more tools like this one, it doesn't mean all the increase in sales is because of the tool.
  3. the post talks a lot about how great this tool is but it describes nearly nothing of value to the outsider who can't access it. What were the valuable lessons learned? What's neat about it? There is not much meat imho.

Spotify built some nonsense like this too and made ridiculous claims that it saves 90 percent of tokens. I guess anything goes these days.