“If you put too much friction in front of people, they're just going to do unsafe things because that's how humans are, right?”
Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Design · September 2026
Krishnamurthy was demoing Stripe's internal agent platform and explaining why tool permissions are scoped to projects rather than set per person. Claire Vo had just raised the cost of making every employee manage their own connectors and approvals. His answer is a claim about people rather than software: put an approval prompt on every tool call and eventually everyone clicks the wrong button.
Transcript
…really good. They're very creative. So we've got to put some restrictions on them so they don't go rogue, right? And projects help us decide. I'd also don't want this to be happening for every person at Stripe. That would be kind of frictionful. So projects are again drawing the boundary around it.
…this connector, connect to this data? And so I do think one of the benefits right now of teams building their own thing is. They can really think about bespoke agents for bespoke use cases, but kind of hide all that complexity from the end employee, the end teammate, and just let them get to work.
…were speaking about bespoke agents, and I showed a little bit of this earlier, Kai looks like a single product. It really isn't. It's like the icing on top of a multi-layer cake, and each of those layers can be like customized to work at the enterprise, right? So, 100% agree that the notion of both customization, but lowering the cost of management, the cost of ownership, and just the friction. If you put too much friction in front of people, they're just going to do unsafe things because that's how humans are, right? We don't, if I showed you this every single session for every single tool, eventually you're going to press the wrong button, right? So, really thinking through that is a big part of what we're trying to do here. So, that's projects and why I love projects as a unit of governance. Let's hop back really quickly to the skill builder flow that I spoke about. Again, we made that dashboard. We want…
again.
This is what happens if you prepare too well for demos. This
is when you do it live. I mean, we believe you. I think what you're showing here, great. You have kind of a skill creator skill or tool. You have a specific spec that you're using to ensure that it's both written well generally for agents, but also written well very specifically for the Kai…
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