In the early days of Stripe, a new style of resource IDs was introduced, characterized by a prefix indicating the type of object they represent, such as "ch_" for Charge and "cus_" for Customer, which greatly influenced others, including Clerk, to adopt similar practices. The generation of IDs is a complex subject, with traditional sequential IDs becoming less favored due to their predictability, potential security vulnerabilities, and the challenges they present in distributed systems where coordination is impractical. To address these concerns, randomness has been incorporated into ID generation to prevent guessing and collisions, while still maintaining some of the desirable traits of sequential IDs, like sortability. This balance is achieved in newer ID generators such as Twitter's Snowflake and Segment's KSUID, both of which implement timestamp and sequence number strategies, with KSUID being preferred by Clerk due to its lack of a worker number component, aligning with their needs and allowing the incorporation of Stripe-like prefixes for enhanced usability.