The AI Record
we found it like a platform where we put this agent and a number of these other specialist agents into our CI infrastructure. And we accept prompts in order to do work, it goes through our CI checks and all our tests run and quality checks, …

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is describing how Minion and other specialist agents sit inside Uber's CI infrastructure.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 05:30.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025

Filed under

Who is speaking

Nikhil Ramakrishnan, AI Foundations & Developer Experience. Works on the developer platform and builds the tools he describes (Minion, DevPod), so he knows how they are used; an insider speaking at a vendor-run summit about his employer's own work, with no figures beyond a stated target.

How this was checked

Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-07).

Exact match in whisper.srt around the 'into our CI infrastructure' cue, about 5:30. The trailing ellipsis marks the omitted continuation. The captions differ, so I confirmed on whisper only.

How to cite this passage

Nikhil Ramakrishnan (Uber), “Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs”, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, 2026-05-07, at 05:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7G5EHDqQ1g Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/uber-minion-agents-in-ci-prompts-go-through-checks-tests-2026

More from the same source

don't promise an engineer the world when you give them a platform, give them a valuable use case because you have to go to where the pain lives. If I can prove to an engineer that the core value proposition of taking certain painful toil tasks away from you is beneficial, they will naturally understand that AI is not here necessarily to take away all of the work, just the parts of the work that are tedious, they require a … and tedium to go execute.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is describing how Uber rolls Minion out to engineers.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 05:59.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

People had to realize for themselves, it had to reach a point of capability before people adopted it.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a host question on whether Uber's builder-oriented engineering culture drives how fast it adopts AI. The sentence before it, on mandating AI use, is left out because the two passes hear it differently.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 11:02.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

Can we give them a way to win back time by a stack ranking that work in a way where they can background some of the toil, right? So that when they get to the validation, 50% to 70% of the work required has been completed by a background agent.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is describing Minion, Uber's background-agent platform, and the engineers who get toil tickets, such as a vulnerability fix with a long validation loop, in the middle of product work.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 04:27.

  • 50% toil work done before validation low, as a goal for Minion tasks, not a measured result. A person approves
  • 70% toil work done before validation high, as a goal for Minion tasks, not a measured result. A person approves

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

We can now take bigger swings that say, oh, reviews are a bottleneck, let's try to make high quality … reviews. Is toil work like cleaning up feature flags or cleaning up things or doing small changes of bottleneck? Let's give you that ability to get you out of that zone. And then measure directly.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a host question on how Uber picks use cases; just before, he says Uber goes strictly by developer-satisfaction data when developers cannot choose.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 07:45.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

And I think the angle with Shepherd ultimately is we need to keep evergreen code. We want to keep our code healthy, … we want to give people the primitive to be able to do that.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is answering a question about Shepherd, which the host describes as Uber's platform for large-scale code changes such as migrations and upgrades. The recording is captioned 'Shepard' on the session page; both passes heard 'Shepherd'.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 10:08.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

If I … give you the tool and I tell you use this or else, that's not gonna work. If I tell you, I give you the tool and that tool says, I can do X, Y and Z and then you actually put it in production and it can do a quarter of X, a tenth of Y and a 50th of Z, I will fail there as well. What I need is the engineer to be able to see that I know the pain they see. That's what gets a builder really hungry. When they know that they can take the tool and they can mold it to their outcome.

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber

Context. Ramakrishnan is describing how Uber's platform team gets engineers to keep using a tool, after saying that adoption comes from letting people fail in a safe way.

Interview: Uber Minion: Agent-Ready Dev Platform Behind 11% of Merged PRs, Ona (YouTube), Background Agents Summit, May 7, 2026, at 12:08.

Checked against the source [ Grade C ] Said in the last year Uber: $52 billion revenue, FY2025 Passage page

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