ACP

Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe

Jun 6, 2026 · 18:46

Steve Kaliski, Principal Software Engineer at Stripe, explains how to build safe payment infrastructure for the autonomous economy, focusing on enabling AI agents to spend money without catastrophic risk. He argues that discovery benefits from non-determinism (e.g., LLMs), but payments and credentials require determinism. Stripe's solutions include shared payment tokens that enforce spend limits per seller, amount, currency, and time; the machine payments protocol with Tempo for paying for API calls via HTTP status codes; and the agent e-commerce protocol with OpenAI for structured checkout flows. Kaliski also demonstrates how Stripe projects wraps these primitives. The goal is to minimize blast radius through verifiable identities, spend policies, and API-driven interactions.

The Missing Primitive for Agent Swarms — Lou Bichard, Ona

May 23, 2026 · 18:37

Lou Bichard, field CTO at Owner, argues that agent swarm infrastructure for coding agents is missing a coordination primitive, while runtimes and orchestration are largely solved. He defines a Software Factory as incrementally removing humans from the SDLC and highlights internal systems from Stripe (Minions) and RAMP (Inspect) as real-world examples. Owner provides VM-level isolation for agent fleets and sub-agent patterns, demonstrated with a demo of process-based and VM-based swarms. Bichard identifies GitHub as a poor coordination layer for hundreds of parallel pull requests and proposes solutions like state machines, durable execution, and a CLI gateway that any local agent can invoke to check progress. He notes context rot and agents skipping steps as key challenges, and announces a public two-week project to build a Software Factory from scratch starting next week.