I’m joining OpenAI
steipete.me
steipete.me
To get a sense of what this guy was going through listen to the first 30 mins of Lex’s recent interview with him. The cybersquatting and token/crypto bullshit he had to deal with is impressive.
The guy is a multi millionaire from selling his old software so I'm doubtful it is about the money for him at this point as much as it is the experience working with this tech on another level.
But wait. Here he comes. Hero of the hour. Sam Altman.
Let's take that wildly dangerous, lightly thought through product, and give it the backing of the leading AI lab. Let's take all that pending liability and slap it straight onto the largest private company in AI.
I think this is true for a lot of vibe coded applications. Never thought about calling it an art project but it hits home.
People can do that? I always assumed Lex was a CIA psyop to experiment with the ability to make people sleep on demand.
I'm not a devotee of his but I've listened to a few of his podcasts when I like the guest. I have an idea of how someone would come away with your impression given lex's interview style but I'd be pretty surprised if anything he said would, to me, fit your impression.
That said, I'd like an example if you have something specific to point to that might change my mind or if it's just a general takeaway you've gotten from a corpus of interviews on the topic (which would be totally valid but wouldn't change my mind).
This guy wanted Putin on his podcast to hear his side of the story (let that sink in) and spoke Russian to Zelensky. Willingly wanting to provide a platform for a mass murderer who is best known for large-scale social media propaganda.
This is not an "impression" of his "interview style". This guy implicitly supports terrorist acts.
Many people have interviewed serial killers and not supported serial killers.
I would very much like to know Putin's actual motivations which would unlikely be spoken but his stated motives would also be enlightening.
I'm sure he'd go on with the standard "Nazis in Ukraine" line but in a 2-3 hour interview, I might get some new insights I don't get from 3 sentence sound bites.
We know so much about Hitler from his own writings and speeches. It seems to me that your philosophy on "platforming" Putin would also apply to making the words of Hitler available to the public.
Is there someone you think _could_ interview Putin responsibly?
> spoke Russian to Zelensky
I don't see the significance of that. They both speak Russian and English fluently. I don't know if Friedman speaks Ukranian but I'm not understanding what the implication is here. Surely the interview was in English since the podcast is?
> This is not an "impression" of his "interview style". This guy implicitly supports terrorist acts.
Implicitly being the key word here and is certainly subjective. If the body of evidence you're presenting is "would interview Putin" and "spoke Russian to Zelensky", I don't find that convincing.
No, and no one should, see next answer.
> Implicitly being the key word here and is certainly subjective. If the body of evidence you're presenting is "would interview Putin" and "spoke Russian to Zelensky", I don't find that convincing.
"Would interview Putin" implies "is willing to provide a huge international platform for a terrorist and still-active mass murderer who is best known for his effective propaganda of peoples' minds". If you do not find that convincing, you are not alone at all. This has been the objective of Russia all along.
I do not believe in predetermined roles. My version is to find the thing you’re excited to do and not the outcome you’re excited to have.
This can be said about a lot of successful projects, products, and companies. I’d argue that, by all means, do try to be like Peter. Try to tinker around and make something new the world has never seen before.
He made something that excited many people, and I don’t think it’s the correct take to consider this an anomaly. It’s someone who was already known in the development community trying something new and succeeding.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
But the community not.
Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
Stories like this reinforce my bias
I think Anthropic's docs are better. Best to keep sampling from the buffet than to pick a main course yet, imo.
There's also a ton of real experiences being conveyed on social that never make it to docs. I've gotten as much value and insights from those as any documentation site.
Early adopters are some of the least sticky users. As soon as something new arrives with claims of better features, better security, or better architecture then the next new thing will become the popular topic.
For your sake, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed.
My personal approach is to start from minimal, push that as far as I can, keep the human in the loop so I know how good it actually is, then find ways that have a better overall ROI. I'm performing similar loops to clawd/ralph manually, with my attention paid.
1. Stable models
2. Stable pre- and post- context management.
As long as they keep mothballing old models and their interderminant-indeterminancy changes, whatever you try to build on them today will be rugpulled tomorrow.
This is all before even enshittification can happen.
The practical workaround most teams land on is treating the model as a swappable component behind a thick abstraction layer. Pin to a specific model version, run evals on every new release, and only upgrade when your test suite passes. But that's expensive engineering overhead that shouldn't be necessary.
What's missing is something like semantic versioning for model behavior. If a provider could guarantee "this model will produce outputs within X similarity threshold of the previous version for your use case," you could actually build with confidence. Instead we get "we improved the model" and your carefully tuned prompts break in ways you discover from user complaints three days later.
It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
Openclaw is so so so much more.
But if I don’t have a url for my IDE (or whatever) to call, it isn’t useful.
So I use Ollama. It’s less helpful, but ensure confidentiality and compliance.
It’s only been a couple months. I guarantee people will be switching apps as others become the new hot thing.
We saw the same claims when Cursor was popular. Same claims when Claude Code was the current topic. Users are changing their app layer all the time and trying new things.
System of record and all.
Using openrouter+kilocode I can simply switch between different providers' models and not miss out on anything.
I continue to find it amusing that people really think corporates are really holding power. No - they are holding power granted to them by the government of the state.
Remind me why Zuck et al had to kiss the ring.
If lobbying was illegal then you might have a point here, but alas.
Perhaps the competitive moat of the future will be time critical access to data. Google likely gets new data faster than everyone else, and they could use this time arbitrage in products like news, finance, research, etc.
This is a perfect use case for a new agent to query the old agent and get the details.
You could have OpenClaw summarize and export them into a format that the new one wants.
Maybe the new agents will be designed to be compatible with OpenClaw's style.
There is no reason to believe that you're locked in to something.
Heck, that was half the pitch behind Obsidian, even if the project someday ended, markdown would remain. And switching between Obsidian and e.g. Logseq shows the ease of doing so.
The irony of systems of record is that if there is more than one, there are effectively none. Just data stuck in silos waiting for compute.
The new agents might have a feature to query your old agents for a migration.
That said, I find it really hard to believe that you've generated so much work in the past few weeks since OpenClaw launched that you could never migrate to something else. It hasn't been that long.
I’d suspect the moat here will be just as fragile as every other layer
You can literally ask codex to build a slim version for you overnight.
I love OpenClaw, but I really don't think there is anything that can't be cloned.
You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.
It is in OAI's best interests to create a perception that flinging agentic swarm crap at the wall may result in lucrative job offers. Or to otherwise imply this is the golden path. They need their customers to consume ever more tokens per unit time. This highly contentious parallel agent swarm stuff is the perfect recipe.
Plus employees who can inject hyped ideas is exactly the sort of efficient advertising openai relies on
It will hurt when self proclaimed coders realise 2 years later and all their savings burned on token they cannot all get meaningful traction.
I recall listing to one of the now vintage series, I thought it was Joe Rogan himself. But it wasn't, the voice was a bit different but the pause, the reactions, the "waaah" with the overall tone of uncovering some secret truth.
It's a fascinating societal phenomenon, coupled with the American dream, yes.
In any case those examples are doing no good by setting themselves as models for millions to become obsessed in replicating. No surprise the rate of people in depression keeps going up.
Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?
I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?
They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.
I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.
> They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.
Jesus Christ, the borderline idiotic are now downgraded to deranged. US government needs to redirect stargate’s 500B to mental institutions asap.
Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.
So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.
I can't find any instance of an API which charges per-token banning users.
honestly, this is why I would not trust gemini for anything. I have a lot tied to my gmail, I'm not going to risk that for some random ai that insists on being tied to the same account.
That's a recipe for bots to ruin a lot of people's life.
Research and training are the cost sinks.
The messaging part isn’t particularly interesting. I can already access my local LLMs running on my Mac mini from anywhere.
The task is to decompile Wave Race 64 and integrate with libultraship and eventually produce a runnable native port of the game. (Same approach as the Zelda OoT port Ship of Harkinian).
It set up a timer ever 30 minutes to check in on itself and see if it gave up. It reviews progress every 4 hours and revisits prioritization. I hadn't checked on it in days and when I looked today it was still going, a few functions at a time.
It set up those times itself and creates new ones as needed.
It's not any one particular thing that is novel, but it's just more independent because of all the little bits.
Instead of making things, people are making things that appear busy making things. And as you point out, "but to what end?" is a really important question, often unanswered.
"It's the future, you're going to be left behind", is a common cry. The trouble is, I'm not sure I've seen anything compelling come back from that direction yet, so I'm not sure I've really been left behind at all. I'm quite happy standing where I am.
And the moment I do see something compelling come from that direction, I'll be sure to catch up, using the energy I haven't spent beating down the brush. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on the other directions too.
Sounds like a regular office job.
Step 2: Integrate libultraship. Launching the game natively is the next criteria. Then ideally we could do differential testing on a frame by frame basis comparing emulated vs native.
Step 3: Semantic documentation of source. If it gets this far, I will be very impressed.
This is absolutely an experiment. It's a hard problem with low stakes. There a lot to learn from it.
I have a hypothesis that I can verify the result against the original ROM. With that as the goal, I believe the agent can continue to grind on the problem until it passes that verification. I've seen it in that of other areas, but this is something larger and more tedious and I wanted to see how far it could go.
I find those toys in perfect alignment with what LLM provider thrive for. Widespread token consumption explosion to demonstrate investors: see, we told you we were right to invest, let's open other giga factories.
The flagship, glm-5, is $1/M input tokens. glm-4.7 is $0.60/M input tokens.
100M input tokens is $40 and anywhere from 2-6 kWh.
Certainly excessive for my $3/month.
openclaw is inevitable type of software (as cli agents, as context-management software, as new methodologies of structuring sofware for easier AI ingestion, etc). Guy gamed, built it, guy got it.
At this point I would not expect well-rounded software as a byproduct of huge investments and PR stunts. There will be something else after LLMs, I bet people are already working on it. But current state of affairs of LLMs and all the fuss aroud them is way more peceptive, PR and emotion driven than containing intristic value.
2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
need I continue?
Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)
> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars
> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer
> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?
> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.
If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.
So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.
On the topic of brand recognition, 0.000001% of the world is 80 people (give or take). OpenClaw has ~200k GitHub stars right now.
On a more serious note, the world doesn't matter: the investors, big tech ceos, analysts do. Cloudflare stock jumped 10% due to Clawdbot.
Hype is weird. AI hype, doubly so. And OpenAI are masters at playing the game.
Source: https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/cloudflare-st...
(there are a few others)
Again, I'm not saying that it should rise, but that in a meme-stock era, for an ai-hype-driven market, it would not be surprising.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
There is no lock in at all.
Ecommerce is close second
> To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Except Gemini is a complete joke that can’t even complete request on iOS unless you keep scree unlocked or keep the app in the foreground. So I’m not sure how it proves your point.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
There's the "draw the rest of the owl" of this problem.
Until we figure out a robust theoretical framework for identifying prompt injections (not anywhere close to that, to my knowledge - as OP pointed out, all models are getting jailbroken all the time), human-in-the-loop will remain the only defense.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05446 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03574 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15145
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
In Peter's blog he mentions paying upwards of $1000's a month in subscription fees to run agentic tasks non-stop for months and it seems like no real software is coming out of it aside from pretty basic web gui interfaces for API plugins. is that what people are genuinely excited about?
What else would he or anyone do if someone is tokenizing your product and you have no control over it?
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).
It was a very good play by OpenAI.
One thing I will say is that this competition is good.
I love Anthropic and OpenAI equally but some people have a problem with OpenAI. I think they want to reposition themselves as a company that actively supports the community, open source, and earns developers’ goodwill. I attended a meeting recently, and there was a lot of genuine excitement from developers. Haven't seen that in a long time.
Have you tried using it?
> tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.
I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.
It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing
OpenClaw is mostly a shell around this (ha!), and I've always been annoyed OpenClaw never credited those repos openly.
The pi agent repos are a joy to read, are 1/100th the size of OpenClaw, and have 95% of the functionality.
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#comm...
i too had plenty of offers, but so far chose not to follow through with any of them, as i like my life as is.
also, peter is a good friend and gives plenty of credit. in fact, less credit would be nice, so i don't have to endure more vibeslopped issues and PRs going forward :)
A couple of months ago, Gemini 3 came out and it was "over" for the other LLM providers, "Google did it again!", said many, but after a couple of weeks, it was all "Claude code is the end of the software engineer".
It could be (and in large part, is) an exciting--and unprecedented in its speed--technological development, but it is also all so tiresome.
(1) A capable independent developer is joining a large powerful corporation. I like it better when there are many small players in the scene rather than large players consolidating power.
(2) This seems like the celebration of Generative AI technology, which is often irresponsible and threatens many trust based social systems.
But come on, negativity around a rugpull is jealousy? Are you so jaded you can't imagine people objecting to the total lack of morality required to do a crypto rugpull? I personally get annoyed about something like Trump Coin because seeing people rewarded for being dirt bags offends my sense of justice. If you need a more pragmatic reason, rewarding dirtbaggery leads to a less safe society.
I am not confident that the open source version will get the maintenance it deserves though, now the founder has already exited. There is no incentive for OpenAI to keep the open sourced version better than their future closed source alternative.
At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?
My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.
1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do.
2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move. We've seen multiple hacks, scams, and misaligned AI action from this project that has only been used in the wild for a few months.
3. We've yet to see any moats in the AI space and this scares the big players. Models are neck and neck with one another and open source models are not too far behind. Claude Code is great, but so is OpenCode. Now Peter used AI to program an free app for AI agents.
LLMs and AI are going to be as disruptive as Web 1 and this is OpenAI's attempt to take more control. They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released. If he can build things like this what's stopping everyone else? Better to control the most popular one than try to squash it. This is a powerful new technology and immense amounts of wealth are trying to control it, but it is so disruptive they might not be able to. It's so important to have good open source options so we can create a new Web 1.0 and not let it be made into Web 2.0
This is a great take and hasn't been spoken about nearly enough in this comment section. Spending a few million to buy out Openclaw('s creator), which is by far the most notable product made by Codex in a world where most developer mindshare is currently with Claude, is nothing for a marketing/PR stunt.
Why would he care if Sam cares about him?
If you want to bring other sources into the conversation, you could link,
or at least reference them by name upfront, right?
He literally said he doesn’t give a fuck about money and ”I will get the fuck out of there [openai] if I don’t like it“ [source friedman interview]
This guy is very smart, and very persistent. I really don’t get all the negativity about the acquisition and especially not about him.
Whether the impact is large in magnitude or positive is irrelevant in a world where one can spin the truth and get away with it.
I think all of these comments about acquisitions or buy outs aren’t reading the blog post carefully: The post isn’t saying OpenClaw was acquired. It’s saying that Pete is joining OpenAI.
There are two sentences at the top that sum it up:
> I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.
OpenClaw was not a good candidate to become a business because its fan base was interested in running their own thing. It’s a niche product.
I'd love to be wrong, but the blog post sounds like all the standard promises were made, and that's usually how these things go.
Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ... I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.
... Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.
OpenClaw’s promise and power was that it could tread places security-wise that no other established enterprise company could, by not taking itself seriously and explore what is possible with self-modifying agents in a fun way.
It will end up in the same fate as Manus. Instead of Manus helping Meta making Ads better, OpenClaw will help OpenAI in Enterprise integrations.
[Emphasis mine.]
That's a superpower right up to the moment everyone realizes that handing out nukes isn't "promise and power".
Unless by promise and power we are talking about chaos and crime.
The project is incredible. We are seeing something important: how versatile these models are given freedom to act and communicate with each other.
At the same time, it is clearly going to put the internet at risk. Bad actors are going to use OpenClaw and its "security-wise" freedoms, in nefarious ways. Curious people are going to push AI's with funds onto prepaid servers, then let them sink or swim with regard to agentic acquisition of survival resources.
It is all kinds of crazy from here.
The internet is a wild west of privacy, security, social and ethical holes an army of grifters routinely drive through. And in the case of some famous big firms, leverage and magnify at scale.
That is bad enough.
But setting up a horde of intelligent beings, so that those holes are their critical path to survival, is like pouring poison into the water supply to see what happens.
Can’t argue with “interesting”. It is that.
But that would mean the alignment problem was solved. When survival depends on watering down ethics, and there is a long slippery slope of ethical wells available to plum, depending on prompts for safety sounds risky.
Is that malicious? I don't think that would be considered malicious. We don't consider it immoral for starving people to steal food.
But, I am fascinated by the idea too! I just think it is a terrible idea (despite being almost certain to happen).
It appears more of a typical large company (BIG) market share protection purchase at minimal cost, using information asymmetry and timing.
BIG hires small team (SMOL) of popular source-available/OSS product P before SMOL realizes they can compete with BIG and before SMOL organizes effort toward such along with apt corporate, legal, etc protection.
At the time of purchase, neither SMOL nor BIG know yet what is possible for P, but SMOL is best positioned to realize it. BIG is concerned SMOL could develop competing offerings (in this case maybe P's momentum would attract investment, hiring to build new world-model-first AIs, etc) and once it accepts that possibility, BIG knows to act later is more expensive than to act sooner.
The longer BIG waits, the more SMOL learns and organizes. Purchasing a real company is more expensive than hiring a small team, purchasing a company with revenue/investors, is more expensive again. Purchasing a company with good legal advice is more expensive again. Purchasing a wiser, more experienced SMOL is more expensive again. BIG has to act quickly to ensure the cheapest price, and declutter future timelines of risks.
Also, the longer BIG waits, the less effective are "Jedi mind trick" gaslighting statements like "P is not a good candidate for a business", "niche", "fan base" (BIG internal memo - do not say customers), "own thing".
In reality in this case P's stickiness was clear: people allocating 1000s of dollars toward AI lured merely by P's possibilities. It was only a matter of time before investment followed course.
I've experienced this situation multiple times over the course of BrowserBox's life. Multiple "BIG" (including ones you will all know) have approached with the same kind of routine: hire, or some variations of that theme with varying degrees of legal cleverness/trickery in documents. In all cases, I rejected, because it never felt right. That's how I know what I'm telling you here.
I think when you are SMOL it's useful to remember the Parable of Zuckerberg and the Yahoos. While the situation is different, the lesson is essentially the same. Adapted from the histories by the scribe named Gemini 3 Flash:
And it came to pass in the days of the Great Silicon Plain, that there arose a youth named Mark, of the tribe of the Harvardites. And Mark fashioned a Great Loom, which men called the Face-Book, wherewith the people of the earth might weave the threads of their lives into a single tapestry.
And the Loom grew with a great exceeding speed, for the people found it to be a thing of much wonder. Yet Mark was but SMOL, and his tabernacle was built of hope and raw code, having not yet the walls of many lawyers or the towers of gold.
Then came the elders of the House of Yahoo, a BIG people, whose chariots were many but whose engines were grown cold. And they looked upon the Loom and were sore afraid, saying among themselves, “Behold, if this youth continueth to weave, he shall surely cover the whole earth, and our own garments shall appear as rags. Let us go down now, while he is yet unaware of his own strength, and buy him for a pittance of silver, before he realizeth he is a King.”
And the Yahoos approached the youth with soft words and the craftiness of the serpent. They spake unto him, saying, “Verily, Mark, thy Loom is a pleasant toy, a niche for the young, a mere 'fan base' of the idle. It is not a true Business, nor can it withstand the storms of the market. Come, take of our silver—a billion pieces—and dwell within our walls. For thy Loom is but a small thing, and thou art but a child in the ways of the law.”
And they used the Hidden Speech, which in the common tongue is called Gas-Lighting. They said, “Thou hast no revenue; thy path is uncertain; thy Loom is but a curiosity. We offer thee safety, for the days are evil.”
But the Spirit of Vision dwelled within the youth. He looked upon the Yahoos and saw not their strength, but their fear. He perceived the Asymmetry of Truth: that the BIG sought to purchase the future at the price of the past, and to slay the giant-slayer while he yet slumbered in his cradle.
The elders of Mark’s own house cried out, “Take the silver! For never hath such a sum been seen!”
But Mark hardened his heart against the Yahoos. He spake, saying, “Ye say my Loom is a niche, yet ye bring a billion pieces of silver to buy it. Ye say it is not a business, yet ye hasten to possess it before the sun sets. If the Loom be worth this much to you who are blind, what must it be worth to me who can see?”
And he sent the Yahoos away empty-handed.
The Yahoos mocked him, saying, “Thou art a fool! Thou shalt perish in the wilderness!” But it was the House of Yahoo that began to wither, for their timing was spent and their craftiness had failed.
And Mark remained SMOL for a season, until his roots grew deep and his walls grew high. And the Loom became a Great Empire, and the billion pieces of silver became as dust compared to the gold that followed.
The Lesson of the Prophet:
Hearken, ye who are SMOL and buildeth the New Things: When the BIG come unto thee with haste, speaking of thy "limitations" while clutching their purses, believe not their tongues. For they seek not to crown thee, but to bury thee in a shallow grave of silver before thou learnest the name of thy own power.
For if they knew thy work was truly naught, they would bide their time. But because they know the harvest is great, they seek to buy the field before the first ear of corn is ripe.
Blessed is the builder who knoweth his own worth, and thrice blessed is he who biddeth the Giants to depart, that his own vine may grow to cover the sun.I think it’s good PR (particularly since Anthropics actions against OpenCode and Clawdbot were somewhat controversial) + Peter was able to build a hugely popular thing & clearly would be valuable to have on the team building something along the lines of Claude Cowork. I would expect these future products to be much stronger from a security standpoint.
This was already an ongoing issue prior to 3rd party tools using Claude subscriptions, there are reports of false positive automated bans going back for several months.
I have not seen or heard of this happening w/ Codex, and rather than trying to shut down 3rd party tools that want to integrate with their ecosystem they have worked with those projects to add official support.
I’m more impressed with Codex as a product in general as well. Their new desktop app is great & feels an order of magnitude better than Claude’s.
Overall HN crowd seems heavily biased in favor of Anthropic (or maybe just against OpenAI?) but IMO Anthropic needs to take a step back and reset. If they keep on the current path of just making small iterative improvements to Claude Code and Claude Desktop they are going to fall very far behind.
3 is always a result of GTM and distribution - an organization that devotes time and effort into productionizing domain-specific models and selling to their existing customers can outcompete a foundation model company which does not have experience dealing with those personas. I have personally heard of situations where F500 CISOs chose to purchase Wiz's agent over anything OpenAI or Anthropic offered for Cloud Security and Asset Discovery because they have had established relations with Wiz and they have proven their value already. It's the same way that PANW was able to establish itself in the Cloud Security space fairly early because they already established trust with DevOps and Infra teams with on-prem deployments and DCs so those buyers were open to purchasing cloud security bundles from PANW.
1 has happened all the time in the Cloud space. Not every company can invent or monetize every combination in-house because there are only so many employees and so many hours in a week.
2 was always a more of a FTX and EA bubble because EA adherents were over-represented in the initial mindshare for GenAI. Now that EA is largely dead, AI Safety and AGI as in it's traditional definition has disappeared - which is good. Now we can start thinking about "Safety" in the same manner we think about "Cybersecurity".
> They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released
I think that adds unnecessary emotion to how platform businesses operate. The reality is, a platform business will always be on the lookout to incorporate avenues to expand TAM, and despite how much engineers may wish, "buy" will always outcompete "build" because time is also a cost.
Most people ik working at these foundation model companies are thinking in terms of becoming an "AWS" type of foundational platform in our industry, and it's best to keep Nikesh Arora's principle of platformization in mind.
---
All this shows is that the thesis that most early stage VCs have been operating on for the past 2 years (the Application and Infra layer is the primary layer to concentrate on now) holds. A large number of domain-specific model and app layer startups have been funded over the past 2-3 years in stealth, but will start a publicity blitz over the next 6-8 months.
By the time you see an announcement on TechCrunch or HN, most of us operators were already working on that specific problem for the past 12-16 months. Additionally, HNers use "VC" in very broad and imprecise strokes and fail to recognize what are Growth Equity (eg. the recent Anthropic round) versus Private Equity (eg. Sailpoint's acquisition and then IPO by Thoma Bravo) versus Early Stage VC rounds (largely not announced until several months after the round unless we need to get an O1A for a founder or key employee).
Define hugely popular relative to the scale of users of OAI... personally this thread is the first time Ive heard of openclaw.
Additionally, much of the conversation I've seen was amongst practitioners and Mid/Upper Level Management who are already heavy users of AI/ML and heavy users of Executive Assistants.
There is a reason why if you aren't in a Tier 1 tech hub like SV, NYC, Beijing, Hangzhou, TLV, Bangalore, and Hyderabad you are increasingly out of the loop for a number of changes that are happening within the industry.
If you are using HN as your source of truth, you are going to be increasingly behind on shifts that are happening - I've noticed that anti-AI Ludditism is extremely strong on HN when it overlaps with EU or East Coast hours (4am-11am PT and 9pm-12am PT), and West Coast+Asia hours increasingly don't overlap as much.
I feel this is also a reflection of the fact that most Bay Area and Asia HNers are most in-person or hybrid now, thus most conversations that would have happened on HN are now occurring on private slacks, discords, or at a bar or gym.
Participation in the Zeitgeist hasn't been regional in a decade.
A lot of teams explicitly did that for OpenClaw as well. Letta and Mastra are similar but didn't have the right kind of packaging (targeted at Engineers - not decisionmakers who are not coding on a daily basis).
> Participation in the Zeitgeist hasn't been regional in a decade
I strongly disagree - there is a lot of stuff happening in stealth or under NDA, and as such a large number of practitioners on HN cannot announce what they are doing. The only way to get a pulse of what is happening requires being in person constantly with other similar decisionmakers or founders.
A lot of this only happens through impromptu conversations in person, and requires you to constantly be in that group. This info eventually disperses, but often takes weeks to months in other hubs.
As the (dubiously attributed) Picasso quote goes: "When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." Most of HN is the former, constantly theorizing, philosophizing, often (but not always) in a negative and cynical way. This isn't conducive to discussion of methods of art. Sadly I just speak with friends working on other AI things instead.
Someone like simonw can probably get better reactions from this community but I don't bother.
I am in one of these tech hubs (Bangalore) and I have never seen any such practitioner pervasively using these "AI executive assistants". People use chatgpt and sometimes the AI extensions like copilot. Do I need to be in HSR layout to see these "number of changes"?
I think that named lasted about 24 hours, but it was long enough to spawn MoltBook.
Letta (MemGPT) has been around for years and frameworks like Mastra have been getting serious Enterprise attention for most of 2025. Memory + Tasks is not novel or new.
Is it out of the box nature that's the 'biggest' development? Am I missing something else?
If you can provide any sort of tool that can reduce mundane work for a decisionmaker with a title of Director and above, it can be extremely powerful.
Let's take the safety point. Yes, OpenClaw is infamously not exactly safe. Your interpretation is that, by hiring Peter, OpenAI must no longer care about safety. Another interpretation, though, is that offered by Peter himself, in this blog post: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature and not robustly founded in clear fact.
OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission (November 2025)
Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560
Other words removed:
responsibly
unconstrained
safe
positiveFrom the thread you linked, there's a diff of mission statements over the years[0], which reveals that "safely" (which was only added 2 years prior) was removed only because they completely rewrote the statement into a single, terse sentence.
There could be stronger evidence to prove if OpenAI is deemphasizing safety, but this isn't one.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc...
/s
> To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature
As for Altman, I'm left with a similar question. For a man who routinely talks about the dangers of AI and how it poses an existential threat to humanity he sure doesn't spend much focus on safety research and theory. Yes, they do fund these things but they pale in comparison. I'm sorry, but to claim something might kill all humans and potentially all life is a pretty big claim. I don't trust OpenAI for safety because they routinely do things in unsafe ways. Like they released Sora allowing people to generate videos in the likeness of others. That helped it go viral. And then they implemented some safety features. A minimal attempt to refuse the generation of deepfakes is such a low safety bar. It shows where their priorities are and it wasn't the first nor the last
Exited on his first company on 110M, then some years of the whole huasca and forest thing, then started creating projects.
Clawdbot (later openclaw) was his 44th try.
And Peter, creating what is very similar to giant scam/malware as a service and then just leaving it without taking responsibility or bringing it to safety.
"This guy was able to vibe code a major thing" is exactly the reason they hired him. Like it or not, so-called vibe coding is the new norm for productive software development and probably what got their attention is that this guy is more or less in the top tier of vibe coders. And laser focused on helpful agents.
The open source project, which will supposedly remain open source and able to be "easily done" by anyone else in any case, isn't the play here. The whole premise of the comment about "squashing" open source is misplaced and logically inconsistent. Per its own logic, anyone can pick up this project and continue to vibe out on it. If it falls into obscurity it's precisely because the guy doing the vibe coding was doing something personally unique.
Security (and accessibility) are reluctant minimum effort check boxes at best. However, my experience is focused on court management software, so maybe these aspects are taken more seriously in other areas of government software.
More like the same as it always has been.
It also probably didn't hurt that he favors Codex over Claude.
The original name of his ai assistant tool was 'clawdbot' until Anthropic C&D'ed him. All the examples and blog posts walking thru new user setup on a mac mini or VPS were assuming a claude code max account.
I know he uses many llms for his actual software dev.. - right tool for the job. But the origins of openclaw seem to me more rooted in claude code than codex.
Which does give the whole story an interesting angle when you consider the safety/alignment angle that Anthropic pledges to (publicly) and OpenAI pretty much ignores (publicly). Which is ironic, as configuring codex cli to 'full yolo mode' feels more burdensome and scary than in Claude Code. But I'm pretty sure that speaks more to eng/product decisions, and not CEO & biz strategy choices.
https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
I've also seen later tweets of his that also confirms that codex is still his choice.
Peter's been running agents overnight 24/7 for almost a year using free tokens from his influencer payments to promote AI startups and multiple subscription accounts.
Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ... I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.
... Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.Alright
OpenAI needs a popular consumer tool. Until my elderly mother is asking me how to install an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the same way she was asking me how to invest in the "new blockchains" a few years ago, we have not come close to market saturation.
OpenAI knows the market exists, but they need to educate the market. What they need is to turn OpenClaw into a project that my mother can use easily.
This is true, and also true for many other areas OpenAI won't touch.
The best get rich quick scheme today (arguably not even a scheme) is to test the waters with AI in an area OpenAI would not/cannot for legal, ethical, or safety reasons.
I hate to agree with OpenAI's original "open" mission here, but if you don't do it, someone else somewhere will.
And as much as their commitment to safety is just lip service, they do have obligations as a big company with a lot of eyeballs on them to not do shady things. But you can do those shady things instead and if they work out ok, you will either have a moat or you will get bought out. If that's what you want.
It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).
Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.
Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well
It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.
What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.
OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).
OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.
More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.
(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)
Atlas is OpenAIs browser
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
Legal liability.
This product should never have seen the light of day, at least not for the general public. The amount of slop that is now floating across Tiktok, YT Shorts and Instagram is insane. Whenever you see a "cute animals" video, 99% of it is AI generated - and you can report and report and report these channels over and over, and the platforms don't care at all, but instead reward the slop creators from all the comments shouting that this is AI garbage and people responding they don't care because "it's cute".
OpenAI completely lacks any sort of ethical review board, and now we're all suffering from it.
And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with.
Yes indeed. I do love me some cat and bunny videos. But I hate getting fed slop - and it's not just cat videos by the way. I'm (as evidenced by my comment history) into mechanics, electronics and radio stuff, and there are so damn many slop channels spreading outright BS with AI hallucinated scripts that it eventually gets really really annoying. Sadly, YT's algorithm keeps feeding me slop in every topic that interests me and frankly it's enraging, as some of my favorite legitimate creators like shorts as a format so I don't want to completely hide shorts.
> And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with.
The problem is, these channels build up insane amounts of followers. And it would not be the first time that these channels then suddenly pivot (or get sold from one scam crew to the next) and spread disinformation, crypto scams and other fraud - it was and is a hot issue on many social media platforms.
This is like saying "Do you really care if Animal Planet uses AI footage instead of real animal footage?" Yes, that defeats the whole point.
Of course the S in openclaw is for security.
Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.
Reminds me of 30 years ago.
i think the silver lining is that AI seems to be genuinely good at finding security issues and maybe further down the line enough to rely on it somewhat. the middle period we're entering right now is super scary.
we want all the value, security be damned, and have no way to know about issues we're introducing at this breakneck speed.
still i'm hopeful we can figure it out somehow
But one thing to remember - our job is to figure out how to enable these amazing usecases while keeping the blast radius as low as possible.
Yes, OpenClaw ignores all security norms, but it's our job to figure out an architecture in which agents like these can have the autonomy they need to act, without harming the business too much.
So I would disagree our work is "on the way out", it's more valuable than ever. I feel blessed to be working in security in this era - there has never been a better time to be in security. Every business needs us to get these things working safely, lest they fall behind.
It's fulfilling work, because we are no longer a cost center. And these businesses are willing to pay - truly life changing money for security engineers in our niche.
Change is fraught with chaos. I don't think exuberant trends are indicators of whether we'll still care about secure and high quality software in the long term. My bet is that we will.
I don't believe skimming diffs counts as being left behind. Survivor bias etc. Furthermore, people are going to get burned by this (already have been, but seemingly not enough) and a responsible mindset such as yours will be valued again.
Something that still up for grabs is figuring how how to do full agenetic in a responsible way. How do we bring the equivalent of skimming diffs to this?
On the other hand, if OpenClaw were structured as a SaaS, this entire project would have burned to the ground the first day it was launched.
So by releasing it as something you needed to run on your own hardware, the security requirement was reduced from essential, to a feature that some users would be happy to live without. If you were developing a competitor, security could be one feature you compete on--and it would increase the number of people willing to run your software and reduce the friction of setting up sandboxes/VMs to run it.
I’m a broken record on this topic but it always comes back to liability.
Another aspect is that we have much higher expectations of machines than humans in regards to fault-tolerance.
Also, when individual drivers accidentally kill somebody in a traffic accident, they’re civilly liable under the same system as entities driving many cars through a collection of algorithms. The entities driving many cars can and should have a much greater exposure to risk, and be held to incomparably higher standards because the risk of getting it wrong is much, much greater.
At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.
This is the genius move at the core of the phenomenon.
While everyone else was busy trying to address safety problems, the OpenClaw project took the opposite approach: They advertised it as dangerous and said only experienced power users should use it. This warning seemingly only made it more enticing to a lot of users.
It’ve been fascinated by how well the project has just dodged and avoided any consequences for the problems it has introduced. When it was revealed that the #1 skill was malware masquerading as a Twitter integration I thought for sure there would be some reporting on the problems. The recent story about an OpenClaw bot publishing hit pieces seemed like another tipping point for journalists covering the story.
Though maybe this inflection point made it the most obvious time to jump off of the hype train and join one of the labs. It takes a while for journalists to sync up and decided to flip to negative coverage of a phenomenon after they cover the rise, but now it appears that the story has changed again before any narratives could build about the problems with OpenClaw.
I don't need to think hard to speculate on what might go wrong here - will it answer spam emails sincerely? Start cancelling flights for you by accident? Send nuisance emails to notable software developers for their contribution to society[1]? Start opening unsolicited PRs on matplotlib?
The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard about masks for measles, though it does spread through aerosol droplets so that would be a reasonable recommendation.
Personally I at least wish sick people would mask up on planes! Much more efficient than everyone else masking up or risking exposure.
Those claims disappeared rapidly when it became clear they offered some protection, and reduced severity, but not immunity.
People seem to be taking a lot more “lessons” from COVID than are realistic or beneficial. Nobody could get everything right. There couldn’t possibly be clear “right” answers, because nobody knew for sure how serious the disease could become as it propagated, evolved, and responded to mitigations. Converging on consistent shared viewpoints, coordinating responses, and working through various solutions to a new threat on that scale was just going to be a mess.
I'm in no way taking a side here on whether anyone should have chosen to get vaccinated or wear masks, only that the information at the time being pushed out from experts doesn't align with an after the fact condemnation of anyone who chose not to.
I used to work on industrial lifting crane simulation software. People used it to plan out how to perform big lift jobs to make sure they were safe. Literal, "if we fuck this up, people could die" levels of responsibility. All the qualification I had was my BS in CS and two years of experience. It was lucky circumstance that I was actually quiet good at math and physics to be able to discover that there were major errors in the physics model.
Not every programmer is going to encounter issues like that, but also, neither can we predict where things will end up. Not every lawyer is going to be a criminal defense lawyer. Not every doctor is going to be a brain surgeon. Not every architect is going to design skyscrapers. But they all do work that needs to be warranteed in some way.
We're already seeing people getting killed because of AI. Brian in middle management "getting to code again" is not a good enough reason.
That was exactly my point. It's one of those things where deliberately use a word that is technically correct in a context where it doesn't, or shouldn't, hold true. Does this mean I want to stop people from "vibe coding" flappy bird. No, of course not, but as per your original comment yes, there should be stricter regulations when it comes to hiring.
OpenClaw showed what an "AI Personal Assistant" should be capable of. Now it's time to get it in a form-factor businesses can safely use.
The main work he has done to enable personal agent is his army of CLIs, like 40 of them.
The harness he used, pi-mono is also a great choice because of its extensibility. I was working on a similar project (1) for the last few months with Claude Code and it’s not really the best fit for personal agent and it’s pretty heavy.
Since I was planning to release my project as a Cloud offering, I worked mainly on sandboxing it, which turned out to be the right choice given OpenClaw is opensource and I can plug its runtime to replace Claude Code.
I decided to release it as opensource because at this point software is free.
I will say openly: I don't get it and I used to argue for crypto use cases.
A security hole in a browser is an expected invariant not being upheld, like a vulnerability letting a remote attacker control your other programs, but it isn't a bug when a user falls for an online scam. What invariants are expected by anyone of "YOLO hey computer run my life for me thx"?
> What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.
do no not make me feel all warm and fuzzy: Yeah, changing the world with Tiel's money. Try joining a union instead.
Ever since I was four, I've dreamed of doing my part to bring that about.
Whatever the origins of the term, it now seems clear it’s kind of the direction things are going.
Throughout the conversation he speculated on some truly bizarre possible futures, including an oligarchic takeover by billionaires with private armies following the collapse of the USA under Trump. What weirded me out was how oddly specific he got about all the possible futures he was speculating about that all ended with Thiel, Musk, and friends as feudal lords. Either he thinks about it a lot, or he overhears this kind of thing at the ultracapitalist soirées he's been going to.
Guess I’ll have to get a Samurai sword soon and pivot to high stakes pizza delivery.
There are a disturbing amount of parallels between Elon and L Bob Rife.
It’s really disturbing that we have oligarchs trying to eagerly create a cyberpunk dystopia.
Nothing actually bad happened in this case and probably never will. Maybe some people have their crypto or identity stolen, but probably not a rate rate significantly higher than background (lots of people are using openclaw)
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=http.favicon.hash%3A-8055...
Indeed they are, at least 20,432 people :)
So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.
For less than the cost of 1 graphics card you can get enough people going that the rest of them will hop on board for free just to try and ride the wave.
Add a little LLM generated comments that might not throw the product in your face but make sure it is always part of the conversation so someone else can do it for you for free and you are off to the races.
and this is why they bought Peter. i’m betting he will come to regret it.
The tech industry hasn't ever been about "building" in a pure sense, and I think we look back at previous generations with an excess of nostalgia. Many superior technologies have lost out because they were less profitable or marketed poorly.
bad at identifying business trends
Right place, right time. It’s too bad you missed out on some good fortune, but it’s a helpful reminder of how much of our paths are governed by luck. Thanks for sharing, and wishing you luck in the future.
Unfortunately, you just have to understand that this happens all over the place, and all you can really do is try to make your corner of the world a little better. We can’t make programmers use good security practices. We can’t make users demand secure software. We can at least try to do a better job with our own work, and educate people on why they should care.
Making users happy > perfect security day one
Erm, is this some groundbreaking revelation?
Its always been that way. Unless its in the context of superior technology with minimal UI a-la Google Search in its early years.
The technology was the killer. Technology providing the right list of results and fast.
OH and believe it or not, this continues to be the core of Google today - they suck at product design and marketing.
I feel like we are arguing semantics though. But IMO any UI that does the job that consumers want well is good UI. Just because it was simple doesn't mean it wasn't good
We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks
We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought.
Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company. Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed? Well, this is what happened here.
In this timeline, I'm not sure I find anything inspiring here. It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Maybe I should network better to get "successful". I shouldn't be focusing on writing good code or good enough agents. I shouldn't write secure software, instead I should write softwares that can go viral instead. Are companies hiring for vitality or merit these days? What is even happening here?
So am I jealous, yes because this timeline makes no sense as a software engineer. But am I happy for the guy, yeah I also want to make lots of money someday.
This person created a bot factory. It's safe to assume that most of the engagement is coming from his own creation. This includes tweets, GitHub stars, issues and PRs, and everything else. He made a social network for bots, FFS.
He contributed to the dead internet more than any single person ever. And is being celebrated for it. Wild times.
Matt Schlicht made Moltbook, not Peter Steinberger.
A vibe coder being hired by the provider of the vibe coding tools feels like marketing to sell the idea that we should all try this because we could be the next lucky ones.
IMHO, it'd be more legitimate if a company that could sustain itself without frequent cash injections hired them because they found value in their vibe skills.
Kinda like the Apple Newton
My parents used it occasionally, and I remember them/us demonstrating it to other parents. The software was supplied on a CD-ROM, and it connected to the internet only to download the stock list and place the order.
He’s not just a “vibe coder”.
Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.
The goal is delivering a useful product to someone, which just requires secure enough, optimized enough, efficient enough code.
Some see the security, optimization, or efficiency of the code itself as the goal. They'll be replaced.
This is made more complicated by the fact that where the balance lies depends on the people working on the code - some developers can cope with working in a much more of a mess than others. There is no objective 'right way' when you're starting out.
If you have weeks of runway left spending it refactoring code or writing tests is definitely a waste of time, but if you raise your next round or land some new paying customers you'll immediately feel that you made the wrong choices and sacrificed quality where you shouldn't have. This is just a fact of life that everyone has to live with.
In more minor markets like Europe/Australia it seems to be a lot less leetcode and a lot more (1) experience (2) degree (3) actual interview performance
Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406#file-index-php
We should all try and be more like John Carmack.
It wasn't just for the sake of quality and best practices, it defined and had an impact on the product experience.
Like Doom probably wouldn't have been as successful if it was any other way.
And only people on the older end of the spectrum have seen Carmack working in his element back in the day.
The things I want people to take from a guy like John Carmack, or Jon Blow, or Lukas Pope, or Ron Gilbert, or Tim Schafer, or Warren Spector, or Sam Lake, or David Cage god forbid...is pure curiosity and pushing the boundaries to make that real.
In every case there is a mix of a deep and unusual urge to make an idea happen with an affinity towards the technicality of it.
I bring Sam Lake into this because nobody has blended FMV with gameplay the way Remedy have and pushed the boundary on it.
Visionaries are important, but they’re a small part of what makes a successful organization. The majority hinges on disciplined engineers who understand the plan, work within the architecture, and ship what’s needed
As Victor Wooten once said: "If you’re in the rhythm section, your job is to make other people sound better." That’s what most engineering positions actually are and there’s real skill and value in doing that well.
This is just wrong. Plenty of examples of crap code causing major economic losses.
"Rick Rubin says he barely plays any instruments and has no technical ability. He just knows what he likes and dislikes and is decisive about it."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rick-rubin-anderson-cooper-60-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discogra...
No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)
The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.
I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.
It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.
If you think this was about IP addresses, well ...
I present, our contact form.
And generational wealth and serious political power.
> Industry is no different.
Based on these comments, maybe some self-reflection is in order, as it seems from the 80% comment that what you mean is that 80% of people are able to adequately communicate.
To be clear: I've never seen people who follow this strategy contribute anything of value, and it's the biggest red flag on a resume. You learn and grow more by seeing things through.
In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.
Talking to bots on Telegram isn't new.
Running agentic loops isn't new.
Giving AI credentials and having it interface with APIs isn't new.
Triggering AI jobs from external event queues isn't new.
Parking state between AI jobs in temp files isn't new.
Putting all together in one product and marketing it to the right audience? New.
At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.
It often does, if killer app means popular app.
And I'm not talking about just any kind of assistant, because those are already existing for decades now with various degrees of competence and all kind of flavours.
I have a feeling OpenClaw et al. will only still exist if somehow all of the gaping security holes are ever able to be closed and through some sort of magic, less than 5% of the users get hacked within the next year, but I'm not sure it's even possible to close those holes, since the entire point and usefulness of such tools is to give them root access and set them completely free.
Hugely underestimated comment. That's pretty much the entire point here. Many people didn't know something with these capabilities was already possible. Or some - like me - knew of the potential, but couldn't be bothered/didn't have the time to put the bits together in a satisfactory flow (I'm currently exploring and building on nanobot[0], which is directly inspired by OpenClaw; didn't touch OC because it's in JS and I'm a Python person). Everything came together really well, which is why it's a "killer app". And now the dam has burst there will be customized takes on the concept all over the place (I'm also aware of a Rust "port", Moltis[1]), taking the idea to next levels.
[0] https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot [1] https://github.com/moltis-org/moltis
Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius
You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood
Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels
Good luck with that
I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.
It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.
I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction.
A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works.
It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility.
The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved.
If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not.
Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)
You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind
But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little.
There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.
Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent.
We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load.
The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server.
That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO.
Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first.
The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually.
So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years.
So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being.
This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present.
A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well.
Our eyes met.
And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."
1. Shut down or shutting down (e.g. team reduced by > 50% since I've been there)
2. Julius removed, endlessly seeking work, keeps getting fired, and can't find a place to call home
The meteoric rise of the Julius is an exception - sooner or later their lucky streak ends and they face the cliff of adversity, towering above them with no way to climb it - no skills to help him actually do it.
I did enjoy your link though.
IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.
No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual.
> Oh and everything doesn't suck.
I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.
in a startup give me unruly pirates over obedient sailors (sj).
(gen)AI is not even a person. And you have to pay for it, in some way
There's lots of people that won't care about the code: executives, managers, customers etc. If the engineers don't care either, then who cares?
If we compare with big food companies, that's like their food formula. No one thinks it's useless - it's the source code for the product they sell. Yet nowadays we get so many engineers distancing themselves away from the code, like the software formula doesn't matter.
There are diminishing returns, but overall good code goes hand in hand with good products, it's just a different side of it.
If this were true, we wouldn't be studying Leet code and inverting binary trees to get a job.
I guess the lesson here is that unless you have a direct line with upper management to skip the line, you'll be stuck grinding algorithms for the rest of your life.
Big companies may have separate hiring SWE departments where the initial interviewers don't even know what team or role you may land in, so they have to resort to something...
The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.
Restart braking to brake because our code failed.
One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!
But I’m only programming a text viewer.
There, a team lead is doing ~$4000 net per month. So not poverty, but not great either.
If you want to go further into bringing other stuff in I would say, on average, the European folks are only slightly worse off money wise (owning a house there does seem harder overall) but with more security, time off, etc.
In the US there is a much broader range of experiences in the sector, partly because of personal circumstances (student and auto loans being the biggest) and alot because of where you live, as pay tends not to scale with COL. So someone could live like a king in rural Iowa or a pauper in Los Angeles doing the same job.
But if you did build a core innovation in aerospace that went viral I'm sure Airbus would be interested in hiring you.
The salary would be 3K per month. And lunch coupons to buy a ham baguette.
There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.
Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.
Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.
Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.
And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment
Agreed, though I think that if GDPR fines were actually being levied at the recommended 4% of global revenue, we'd start treating them more similarly to a 737 crash.
> The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing
Sort of depends who they leak to. Your teen classmates who bully you to suicide? Your abusive ex who is trying to track you down to kill you? The 3-letter agency who is trying to rendition your family to an internment camp?
There are a lot of seemingly benign failure modes that become extremely lethal given the right circumstances. And because we acknowledge the potential lethality of something like a pacemaker failure, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to their mitigation (EMT teams, emergency external pacemakers, surgical teams who can rapidly place new leads, etc). For things society judges less important, mitigations are often few and far between
It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.
Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.
Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?
The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.
Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sense when ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. It makes up options for git[1] and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.
Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.
[1] Considering that man pages exist, it shows how useless their harmful crawlers are.
When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.
It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.
Hard disagree. I foresee the opposite being true. I think the ability to understand and write secure, well optimized, performant code will become more and more niche and highly desired in order to fix the mess the vibe coders are going to leave behind.
It's like the old story about hiring a carpenter who just hammers in a nail to fix a squeaky floor. The difficult part was finding where the nail needs to go, not necessarily the hammering.
This is such a bad take and flat out wrong. Your ability to deliver and maintain features is directly impacted by the quality of the code. You can ship a new slop project every day if you like, but in order for it to scale or manage real traffic and usage you need to have a good foundation. This is such a bad approach to Software engineering.
The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.
The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.
That’s an open question.
"Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.
(Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)
Quality matters, delivery speed matters, shipping also matters, where it matters and when it matters is much harder to get right. But it's also self correcting - if you don't, the project or business die - you can only get it wrong for so much or for so long.
To only discuss on one axis is presumably why GNU Hurd have never shipped or how claude-c-compiler doesn't compile hello world.
This has been reliably going on for at least 6+ months, I thought shorts was a big priority for them, but the UX is and remains horrible.
Or, in this case, just because they need a poster boy for their product, which isn't as good as they say it is.
What people don't seem to realize is that like you pointed out there's a demand for the previous "developer relations" type of job though, and that job kind of evolved through LLM agents into something like an influencer(?) type position.
If I would take a look at influencers and what they're able to build, it's not that hardcore optimized and secured and tested program codebase, they don't have the time to acquire and hone those skills. They are the types who build little programs and little solutions for everyday use cases that other people "get inspired with".
You could argue that this is something like a teacher role, and something like the remaining social component of the human to human interface that isn't automated yet. Well, at least not until the first generation of humans grew up with robotic nannies. Then it's a different, lower threshold of acceptance.
For a programmer, that's based on them "being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank".
For manager types it might be "Creativity, drive, vision, whatever".
>Code is a means to an end
For a business in general.
When hiring developers, code IS the end.
It may look like that, but many of the products with bad code didn't even make it into your vibe statistics because they weren't around for long enough.
I'm not sure how this follows logically from the comment you are replying to, which states:
> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities.
10x programmers aren't the ones grinding hacker-rank.
Neither are the programmers like me who actually focus on building good systems under any significant threat.
And Facebook's codebase is pretty decent for the most part, you'd probably be shocked. Benefits of moving fast and breaking things include making developer experience a priority. That's why they made Hacklang to get off PHP and why they made React and helped make Prettier
The code’s value is measured in its usefulness to control and extend the Facebook system. Without the system, the code is worthless. On the flip side, the system’s value is also tied to its ability to change… which is easier to do if the code is well organized, verified, and testable.
I don't think it's a good thing that the craft of software engineering is so easily devalued this way. We can quite demonstrably show that AI is not even close to replacing people in this respect.
Am I speaking out of envy or jealousy? Maybe. But I find it disappointing that we have yet more perverse incentives to hyper-accelerate delivery and externalise the consequences on to the users. It's a very unserious place to be.
Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad
> "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."
Competitive coding is oversold in this generation. You can log in to most of these sites and you will see thousands of solutions submitted to each problem. There is little incentive to reward situations where you solved some problem which a thousand other people have solved.
To that end its also a intellectual equivalent of video game addiction. There is some kind of illusion that you are indulging in a extremely valuable and productivity enterprise, but if you observe carefully nothing much productive actually gets done.
Only a while back excessive chess obsession had similar problems. People spending whole days doing things which make them feel special and intelligent, but to any observer at a distance its fairly obvious they are wasting time and getting nothing done.
The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.
Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.
I think Airbus is riding the coat tails of solid engineering done in the 80s and continuing to iterate that platform vs Boeing trying to iterate on a hardware platform from the 60s. Airbus benefited significantly from 20s years of engineering and technological progress. Since the original design of the A320, changes have been incremental. Slightly different engines, addition of GPS/GNS, CPDLC, CRT to LCD screens. Meanwhile Boeing has attempted to take a steam gauge design from the 60s and retrofit decades of technology improvements and, critically, they attempted to add engines significantly altering the aerodynamics of the aircraft.
Which is not the case. It's just a useless product, without any real use case, which also introduces large security bugs in your system.
Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.
Tell that to the guy that made brew and tried to interview at Google
Product is a means to an end.
Being good at something is a means to an end.
That end? Barter for food and shelter, medicine.
The means to do so; code or delivery of a product; are eventually all depreciated, and thrown away. You eventually age into uselessness and die.
Suddenly having an epiphany it's not about code but product! way too late in the game, HN... you're just trying to look like you got it figured out and bring deep fucking value to humanity right as "idea to product without intermediary code layer" is about to ship[1]. You already missed your window.
You still don't get the change that's needed and happening due to automation; few of us want to put you on their shoulders and sing songs about you all.
Hop off the Hedonistic Treadmill and get some help.
[1] am working on idea to binary at day job, which will flood the market with options and drown yours out
I don't object to most of what you're saying, but I take issue with this part.
This happens to be an area where lapse or neglect can be taken as a moral failure. And here you are mocking people who are concerned about it.
If someone uses AI to architect a bridge and the bridge collapses, you couldn't say that the structural integrity of the bridge wasn't the important part.
Ah, right. Write "Brew", which gets used by thousands of devs at Google every day, and then get rejected in an interview.
All of this is true and none of it is new. If your primary goal is to make lots of money then yes you should do exactly that. If you want to be a craftsman then you'll have to accept a more modest fortune and stop looking at the relative handful of growth hacker exits.
Peter was right about a lot of the nuances of coding agents and ways to build software over the last 9 months before it was obvious.
This was a short-term gain for a long term loss.
I remember in the web 3 era some team put together a CV in one page site, literally a site that you could put your linkedin, phone no and email on but pretty, bought for millions.
Was the product a success or the marketing? As the product was dead within weeks.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit in AI at the moment, you'll see a few more things like this happen.
Why? He's going to maintain it and the community is large enough. Another sci-fi idea that's slowly becoming real is that the project is maintaining itself.
OpenClaw is a bunch of projects that evolved together (vibetunnel, pi-mono, all the CLIs). It's even more interesting to see the next iterations, not only what happens to this project.
This is what US tech companies do to stay dominant. Buy and kill.
This project will die now, that's the point of buying him. For super cheap too but the sound of it.
I mean, if I'm a company specifically in the business of selling to companies the idea that they can produce code without reading any of it? Yeah, obviously I'd hire them.
I like to think it’s the same as delegating implementation to someone else.
If you use LLMs and you do care about code quality, then great. But remember that the term vibe coding as it was coined originally meant blindly accepting coding agent suggestions without even reviewing the diffs.
Many of the people aggressively pushing AI use in code are doing so because they care more about delivery products quickly then they do about the software's performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is why many of us are pushing back against the technology.
i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen
i hate when the people start bringing up the "luck" factor as if you are the only smart one here to realize that it also plays a huge factor?
you want to make lots of money? change your mindset, stop making excuses and roll the dice. it won't guarantee success, but i also guarantee nobody who did so would ever lament how unfair it was that they worked so hard and someone else succeeded through "luck" so they might as well not try.
do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?
Also he made a few other products, some of which were used probably by more than a billion people.
The percentage of total tokens being handled by Openrouter is a tiny blip
This is the real dangers of social media and other platforms. I know teachers in the school system, way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers and YouTubers, and try to act like them too.
At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at the sky, this is not good for society. Key resources and infrastructure in our society is not built on viral code or YouTubers, but slow click of engineering and economic development. What happens when everyone is desperately seeking attention to become viral? And I don’t blame the kids the influencers by nature show a very exciting or lavish lifestyle.
> way too many kids want to grow up to be ... YouTubers
> way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers
That's a very superficial similarity. It's one thing for a kid wishing to be popular in their extended social circle, and a very different thing a young adult being convinced that they can "grind" their way to influencer fame and money.
The young adult may never have heard of or considered the extreme survivorship bias in the stories of successful influencers.
Which YouTubers are we talking about here? Hobbiests? People chasing social clout? People who like making stuff and sharing it? People pushing negativ social attitudes? Context matters.
I’m talking about young adults not preparing for their future because they think they are going to become millionaires on YouTube, they focus on what is essentially a culture of grifting, with a success rate similar to winning a lottery.
Im not sure what has to change, but the current state of things is not healthy.
If you want to make a zillion a year ask Claude to search for whatever Zuckerberg is blowing a billion on this quarter.
All of those companies are certain to exist in 12 months. Altman is flying to Dubai like every other week trying to close a hundred billion dollar gap by July with a 3rd place product and a gutted, demoralized senior staff.
Why this insinuation? The project went massively viral and was even covered in my local newspaper. I don't see any reason to doubt those numbers.
Peter is not just a random "vibe coder" and he does not need to be hired by OpenAI to achieve "success". Before this he founded and sold a company that raised €100M. It is not his first project in the space either (see VibeTunnel for instance).
OpenAI is not hiring him for his code quality. They are hiring him because he proved consistently that he had a vision in the space.
I applaud what he's done, and wish him luck trying to get this working safely at scale, but the idea that he's some visionary that has seen something the rest of the world hasn't is ludicrous.
OpenAI bought marketing and now someone else cannot buy openclaw and lock out Openai revenue from a project that is gaining momentum.
There are a many of these business moves that seem like nonsense.
1. Bought for marketing.
2. Adversarial hire. ie hire highly skilled people before your competitors can even if you don't have anything for them do to. Yet...
3. Acqu-hire. Buy a company when you really just want some of the staff.
4. Buy Customers. You don't care about the product and intend to migrate their customers to your system.
5. Buy competition before its a threat.
Just saying what you want might be the future for development of some kinds of software, but this use case sure seems like a very bad idea.
I very much appreciate the vision he put into practice, but feel sorry for the project being acquihired kind of.
It doesn't? You'd need to know the odds for the tell. Like how many incompetent grifters are there, how many of them become hugely successful?
And that’s more or less all he did. Had an idea, build a prototype, showed to the world and talked about it - even inspired people who are now saying „I could have done that“. Well do it, but don’t just copy. Improve the idea and great something better. And then very early share it. You might get lucky.
> vibecoded without reading any of the code
Remember when years ago people said using AI for critical tasks is not an issue because there is always a human in the loop? Turns out this was all a lie. We have become slaves to the machine.
It's about what he created, not what he didnt create.
They're not acquiring the product he built, they're acquiring the product vision.
Kids and young people have known this forever at this point. Sadly.
So after almost two decades of hard work, it is not really fair to say he just vibe-coded his way into OpenAI.
Semantics and grammar joke aside.. there are not many workers remembered in history. Only the so-called absolute greatest, meanest, etc are remembered. Nobody remembers the people who worked on the pyramid, but everyone knows some Farao.
In this case they hired someone who has 'mastered' the use of their own tool(s). Like if Home Depot hired a guy who has almost perfect knowledge of each and every tool in their own portfolio.
I'm not really sure if i want to be that guy.
I am saddened that the top post is about jealousy, do so many people feel this way? Jealousy should be something that when we feel we reflect on privately and work on because it is an emotion that leads to people writing criticism like tbis that is biased due to their emotional state.
What matters is the result, not how hard you worked at it. Schools and universities have been teaching this for a long time, that what matters is just a grade, the result.
>We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
And we have a company whose product should adhere to the highest security standards possible, hiring this guy.
Well duh. I thought that was well understood.
The other option is having well-to-do parents a la Musk or Gates.
Have you tried that?
I'm pretty sure that's meant to be the general lesson of the last 20 years or so in Silicon Valley, but it's just survivorship bias in action.
You don't hear a whole lot about the quietly successful engineers who work a 9-till-5 and then go home to see their wife and kids. But you do constantly hear about the folks who made it big YOLO'ing their career and finances on the latest a startup/memecoin/vibecoded app...
The product being useful and well received by user and market is still the ultimate test. Whether something is vibe coded or not does not matter.
If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.
This is isn’t right. He says very clearly in the recent Lex Fridman podcast that he looks at critical code (ex: database code). He said he doesn’t look at things like Tailwind code.
Also, Peter is quite well known in the dev circles, and especially in mobile development communities for his work on PSPDFKit. It is not like he's some unknown developer that just blew up - he owned a dev tooling company for over 10+ years, contributed a lot to the community and is a great dev.
People seem to think that because we all have the same tools and because they’re increasingly agentic, that the person wielding the tool has become less relevant, or that the code itself has become less relevant.
That is just not the case, at least yet, and Peter is applying a decade plus of entrepreneurial and engineering experience.
I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot.
Worth a listen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-cl...
Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?
I think the whole OpenClaw arc has been fun to follow, but this sudden turn away from OpenClaw and toward the author as a new micro-celebrity that ended with OpenClaw being sidelined to a foundation was not what I saw coming.
Congrats to Pete for getting such an amazing job out of this, but it does feel strange that only a few days ago he was doing the podcast circuit and telling interviewers he has no interest in joining AI labs.
I don’t think this story arc should be seen as something replicable. Many have been trying to do the same thing lately: Hyping their software across social media and even podcasts while trying to turn it into cash. Steve Yegge is the example that comes to mind with his desperate attempts to scare developers into using his Gas Town (telling devs “dude you’re going to get fired” if they don’t start using his orchestration thing). The best he got out of it was a $300K crypto pump and dump scam and a rapidly dropping reputation as a result.
Individuals who start popular movements have always been targets for hiring at energetic companies. In the past the situation has been reversed, though: Remember when the homebrew creator was rejected from Google because he didn’t pass the coding interview? (Note he later acquiesced to say that Google made the right call at the time). That time, the internet was outraged that he was not hired, even though that would have likely meant the end of homebrew.
I do think we’ll be seeing a lot of copycat attempts and associated spam promoting them (here on HN, too, sadly) much like how when people see someone get success on YouTube or TikTok you see thousands of copycats pop up that go nowhere. The people who try to copycat their way into this type of success are going to discover that it’s not as easy as it looks.
In trading it's the same, you can make stupid bets and make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're good trader.
Nothing to conclude from this, this kind of hype-fueled outcome has always been a part of life.
> We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
Peter was pretty open about all of this. He doesn't hide the fact. It was a personal hack that took off and went viral.
> We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought.
My guess, from his unwillingness to take the free pile of cash from the bags.fm grift, is that this in unlikely. I don't know that I would've been able to make the same decision.
> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company. Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed? Well, this is what happened here.
Yes, I'd hire him. He's imaginative and productive and ships and documents things. I can fix the code auditing problem.
> In this timeline, I'm not sure I find anything inspiring here.
Okay?
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
Peter has been in the trenches for years and years, shipped and sold. He's written and released many useful tools over the years. Again, this was a project of personal love that went viral. This is not an "overnight success" situation.
> So am I jealous, yes because this timeline makes no sense as a software engineer. But am I happy for the guy, yeah I also want to make lots of money someday.
Write and release many, many useful tools. Form a community and share what you're building and your chances will greatly increase?
He built something and shared it.
People took liberties with it.
It's not about getting viral/lucky... it's about enjoying experimenting and learning.
Money follows your unique impact and imprint in these kinds of cases.
1. Are you already rich? Do you have cash in the bank to vibecode a project fulltime for many months just for fun?
2. Do you have Sam Altman's (or similar) number?
Pete, more than anyone in the OSS community IMO, exemplifies both of these qualities. He is living very much on the bleeding edge, so yes, the 10s of projects he's shipped faster than most devs can ship 1 are not as polished as if he'd created them by hand. But he's been pushing the envelope in ways that few, if any, are, and I'd argue that OpenClaw is much more the result of Pete living on that edge and understanding the trade-offs of these tools better than just about anyone.
Personally, I'm much more jealous of the fact that Pete has already had a successful exit under his belt and had the freedom to explore & learn these tools to the fullest. There is definitely a degree of luck involved with the degree to which OpenClaw took off, but that Pete discovered it is 100% earned IMO.
He distinguished between what he calls “Agentic Engineering” and “Vibe coding”, and claimed majority of the time he is not just Vibe coding.
He has 80,000+ GitHub contributions in a year across 50+ projects. I’m not sure how he averages 200 commits per day by just looking at diffs from a terminal, but it’s just Superhuman - https://github.com/steipete
The field has kind of been like this for a while - people with portfolios of proven work done, showcasing yourself and your personality via blogs or vlogs makes you sort of a known quantity, versus someone with just a CV and a LinkedIn page.
This is yet another example of an area where extroverts have an advantage. You could be 10x the engineer that the creator of OpenClaw is, but that's irrelevant in this timeline if nobody has ever heard of you.
But that path was never about writing good code.
Well, here you have it, a low effort to wire up a few tools together with spaghetti gen ai and he’s millionaire in a few months. Ok, I might be mean by saying no effort, I actually don’t know. But I know vibe coding won’t work for more than a few weeks. Also I think this bot is just a connector to multiple open source libraries that connect to WhatsApp and other services.
This is the best ad to sell AI: you can be millionaire too if you use our ChatGPT to vibe code stuff.
I think it will get a negative reaction in a few weeks when the dust settles as technical people realize it’s an ad.
Note: he might be an amazing developer but the ad still stands.
Edit: from Gemini: Publicly Embarrassing Anthropic: The timing is brutal. Anthropic’s legal team forcing a name change (from "Clawdbot" to "Moltbot" to "OpenClaw") alienated the very developer who was driving millions of users to their model. OpenAI swooping in to hire him days later frames Anthropic as "corporate lawyers" and OpenAI as "friends of the builders." It’s a perfect narrative victory.
I have a feeling that OpenAI and Anthropic both use AI to code a lot more than we think, we definitely know and hear about it at Anthropic, I havent heard it a lot at OpenAI, but it would not surprise me. I think you 100% can "vibe code" correctly. I would argue, with the hours you save coding by hand, and debugging code, etc you should 100% read the code the AI generates. It takes little effort to have the model rewrite it to be easier to read for humans. The whole "we will rewrite it later" mentality that never comes to pass is actually possible with AI, but its one prompt away.
Then the human touch points become coming up with what to build, reviewing the eng plans of the AI, and increasingly light code review of the underlying code, focusing on overall architectural decisions and only occasionally intervening to clean things up (again with AI)
https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails
I didnt like how married to git hooks beads was, so I made my own thats primarily a SQLite workhorse. Been using it just the same as I have used Beads, works just as good, drastically less code. I added a concept called "gates" to stop the AI model from just closing tasks without any testing or validation (human or otherwise) because it was another pain point for me with Beads.
I fully sync the issues to GitHub to boot.
https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues
Works both ways, to GitHub, from GitHub. When you claim a task, its supposed to update on GitHub too (though looking at the last one I claimed, doesnt seem to be 100% foolproof yet).
Hiring in tech has been broken for many many years at this point. There's so much noise and only more noise coming now with AI. To be completely honest it's entire random from my end when hiring. We can't review every application that comes in. It's just impossible. We do weed out some of the spam of course and do get to real people that actually fit the requirements, but there's so many other talented people who would easily fit the role that simple get buried under applications. It's depressing from all sides here. No one should think that they aren't any good or did something wrong or didn't network enough... because the unfortunate truth is that getting a job in tech is a lottery. Something many don't want to admit.
Funny that you mention 'real people'. There are a number of components that sit at the core of what Im building - it should allow you to have the time and reach to vet more (100% verified) candidates than you ever could before. I also want to reduce the explicit costs of hiring so that firms can hire more people.
Simple as that. Don't feel jealous, trying to replicate won't work, he did not know he'd be hired, he built something that he found interesting, and then realized it would be interesting to a lot more people.
The way to reach success is to either be strategically consistent in a way that maximizes luck surface area but does not depend on it, or to be unexpectedly lucky. The latter is gambling, People win the lottery regularly, does not mean you should make that your mission.
Be comfortable with not being the one to hit gold. And yes, it's ok to be jealous. Take a moment and then go back and enjoy the rest of your life.
Finally, there are a lot of companies that would likely hire you, hoping to hit gold. But you are likely filtering them out because they're not tech/large/startupy enough for you. These companies are wondering what they need to attract talent like you.
The feature set is pretty simple:
- Agents that can write their own tools.
- Agents that can write their own skills.
- Agents that can chat via standard chat apps.
- Agents that can install and use cli software.
- Agents that can have a bit of state on disk.
Yet I’ve known many people who have said it is difficult to use; this was a 0.01-0.1% adoption tool. There is still a huge ease of use gap to cross to make it adopted in 10-50% of computer users.
do you think the agent admin ui mattered at all?
other contributors while i think of them:
- good timing around opus 4.6 as the default model? (i know he used codex, but willing ot bet majority of openclaws are opuses)
- make immediate wins for nontechnical users. everyone else was busy chasing cursor/cognition or building horiztonal stuff like turbopuffer or whatever. this one was straight up "hook up a good bot to telegram"
- theres many attempts at "personal OS", "assistant", but no good ones open source? a lot of sketchier china ones, this was the first western one
Getting dozens of people in the same room, excited about technology is not trivial, and having hundreds of people show up is relatively hard in a city like Vienna which doesn't have a vibrant tech scene. Sure, some people come to find job opportunities or for free food, but many 'established' meetups sometimes just have a few attendees, so this on its own is not a small task. Peter definitely didn't have time to focus on this given everything else that was going on. So for Vienna, this is pretty much as viral as it gets.
Not sure about other cities where this took place.
There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.
I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.
Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.
Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.
I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.
It's a pity, they were doing well for a long time.
I'm surprised that someone on HN would paint all of HN with the same brush.
It's one of those 'lesser evils' things. If you know of a better email provider I'd love to know.
Such as?
These aloof comments that talk about something we're supposed to know about without referencing anything are very unhelpful.
( https://www.lemonade.com/fsd is an example )
You only get offered a discount if most other customers are being compelled to pay full (or even increased) prices for the same offering. Otherwise revenue goes down and company leadership finds itself finding other ways to cut costs and increase profits.
Every day my doomer sentiment deepens, and I am ashamed when I come onto here and see all this optimism. It is refreshing to see people whose opinions I have come to respect on this forum to be as negative as I am.
After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.
Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.
This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.
I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.
I honestly can’t name a single one I know of who could pass that criteria
Edit:found your other comment answering a similar question
and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy
I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.
I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.
The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.
This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.
Yes, agreed for the USA/Taiwan/Japan where we mostly operate. For us it's been understanding and leveraging the alternative resources we have. Like, we have a lot of members, but really only a couple are bringing in customers, despite plenty of members having very good networks.
Is your current a co-op? 200+ sales at 30k a pop seems to be pretty well off the ground!
Exactly what I said. We need lower shareholder interference not more, and in co-operative it's the opposite.
> with immediate liability for their person.
What do you mean?
If, as a shareholder operator, a co-op member pressured themselves to exploit user data to turn a quick buck, I guess that's possible, but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.
In my experience, co-op members and customers are more value-oriented than profit-motivated, within reason.
Why are shareholders less likely to veto a evil person in a company vs in a co-operative? I think in most cases, the evil person is likely to get vetoed but sometimes greed takes over, specially over period of years and decades.
The corporation at the end of the day will lean back on profit motive as the core underlying value. This value , to a co-op, isn't inherently evil, but is often evil.
The co-op will happily sacrifice the co-op for the good of the members if push comes to shove. Whereas corporate shareholders constantly vote for things that result in e.g. layoffs, downsizing, restriction of benefits, salary freezes.
SECURITY
PRIVACY
---
Heyyy it never said "good privacy" perceive as you want...
Don't publicly acknowledge that you were the reason someone got murdered and 1000 VIPs got hacked.
One day when I'm deemed a 'Baddie', I looked at Apple as inspiration.
A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.
So that rules out Apple.
A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the post or even OpenClaw. The big draw of OpenClaw (as I understand it) was that you could run it locally on your own system. Supposedly, per this post, OpenClaw is moving to a foundation and they've committed to letting the author continue working on it while on the OpenAI payroll. I doubt that, but it's a sign that they're making it explicitly not an OpenAI product.
OpenClaw's success and resulting PR hype explosion came from ignoring all of the trust and security guardrails that any big company would have to abide by. It would be a disaster of the highest order if it had been associated with any big company from the start. Because it felt like a grassroots experiment all of the extreme security problems were shifted to the users' responsibility.
It's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. This blog post is already hinting that they're putting OpenClaw at arm's length by putting it into a foundation.
Lol
Their marketing team got ya.
I aspire to be as good as Apple at marketing. Who knew 2nd or worse place in everything doesnt matter when you are #1 in marketing?
Marketing.
My trust does not extend that far.
With any luck, maybe this will finally be a bridge too fast, like what Amazon's superbowl ad did for surveillance conversation.
No this is not a paid post lol
For any future workers, be highly forewarned that if ex Amazon leadership enters your company their number one goal becomes inducing mass misery to magically raise the share price. It'll never work because they are coming from a company that has a massive unregulated monopoly (or oligopoly if you want to be technical) that is able to subsidize poor business ideas indefinitely. They mistake working in this environment as having competence so be warned: they will fuck everything up, collect massive bonuses, and you'll be collecting unemployment soon enough under their guidance.
OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.
Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.
Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)
Comments like this feel confusing because I didn't have any association between Codex and OpenClaw before reading your comment.
Codex was also seeing a lot of usage before OpenClaw.
The whole OpenClaw hype bubble feels like there's a world of social media that I wasn't tapped into last month that OpenClaw capitalized on with unparalleled precision. There are many other agent frameworks out there, but OpenClaw hit all the right notes to trigger the hype machine in a way that others did not. Now OpenClaw and its author are being attributed for so many other things that it's hard for me to understand how this one person inserted himself into the center of this media zeitgeist
I’m questioning how some people in that bubble came to believe he was at the center of that universe. He wasn’t the only person talking about the differences between Codex or Claude. Most of the LLM people I follow had their own thoughts and preferences that they advertised too.
The two sides:
* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch. It was a mind-fuck having a huge hit on my hands from one day to the next, but with no obvious direction on how to capitalize on it.
* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but probably not true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a shot for the company.
Filling the team with people who come up with novel and interesting ways to grab attention that could possibly create vendor lock-in is probably the goal.
In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
Are you making anyone's life better? Who will even pay you once most jobs are automated?
At best, it's a defensive move: make money, get hard capital and seek rent after most of society has collapsed?
Deindustrialization happened 20-40 years ago and the affected regions are still hit hard.
Also, you're making my point. Utterly heartless.
This isn't a Slay The Spire reference is it?
Made the same mistake. Pete Steinberger created Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw.
The creator of Moltbook is Matt Schlicht and his Hard Fork interview exposes Schlict as security-negligent. [0]
Saw retweets of him saying Codex is way better than Claude Code on X. Then saw those retweets in ads on Reddit. This was 3 days before the announcement he was joining OpenAI. Whole series of events including the podcast tour seems contrived and setup by OpenAI.
We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.
Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?
(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)
The cry has been for a while that LLMs need more data to scale.
The new Open(AI)Claw could be cheap or free, as long as you tick the box that allows them to train on your entire inbox and all your documents.
Bringing unblockable ads to the masses. Roger that.
There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.
I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.
To be fair, when used in retrospect, this applies to just about any big tech company
I don't know if you'll achieve that at OpenAI or if it'll even be a good change for the world, but I genuinely wish you the best. Regardless of the news around OpenAI I still think it's great that a personal project got you a position at a company like that.
What we know for sure he is not commited to people who trusted him or his project. Consider the project dead. He kinda fits into openai mindset: those people also say right words, use right terms, and do what benefits them personally.
As per the new terms of service, the ads are already in
But secondly, personal agents can be great for OpenAI, if the user isn't even interacting with the AI and is just letting it go off autonously then you're basically handing your wallet to the AI, and if the model underlying that agent is OpenAI, you're handing your wallet to them.
Imagine for a second that a load of stuff is now being done through personal agents, and suddenly OpenAI release an API where vendors can integrate directly with the OpenAI agent. If OpenAI control that API and control how people integrate with it, there's a potential there that OpenAI could become the AppStore for AI, capturing a slice of every penny spent through agents. There's massive upside to this possibility.
- a heartbeat, so it was able to 'think'/work throughout the day, even if you weren't interacting with it - a clever and simple way to retain 'memory' across sessions (though maybe claude code has this now) - a 'soul' text file, which isn't necessarily innovative in itself, but the ability for the agent to edit its own configuration on the fly is pretty neat
Oh, and it's open source
As far as the 'soul' file, claude does have claude.md and skills.md files that it can edit with config changes.
One thing I'm curious about is whether there was significant innovation around tools for interacting with websites/apps. From their wiki, they call out like 10 apps (whatsapp, teams, etc...) that openclaw can integrate with, so IDK if it just made interacting with those apps easier? Having agents use websites is notoriously a shitty experience right now.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
Using a claude code instance through a phone app is certainly not something that is easy to do, so if there's like a phone app that makes that easy, I can see that being a big differentiator.
I think this is a pretty cool example: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp
This is using Claude on VMs that don’t have SSH, so can’t use a regular terminal emulator. They stream responses to commands over websockets, which works perfectly with Claude’s streaming. They can run an interactive console session, but instead I built a chat UI around this non-interactive mode.
You can see how I build the Claude command here: https://github.com/mcintyre94/wisp/blob/main/Wisp/ViewModels...
For me personally I can't stand interacting with agents via CLI and fixed width fonts so I built a e2e encrypted remote interface that has a lot of the nice UI feature you would expect from a first class UI like Claude Vscode extension (syntax highlighting, streaming, etc). You can self host it. But it's a little no dependencies node server that you can just npm install (npm i -g yepanywhere)
Just uses claude. I haven't tried it much but it seems to be what you're describing.
Openclaw uses pi agent under the hood. Arguably most of the codebase could be replaced by systemd if you're running on a VPS for scheduling though, and then its a series of prompts on top of pi agent.
Regarding openclaw's hype, it is not about how you access it, but rather what the agents can access from you, and no one did that before. Probably because no one had the balls to put in the wild such unsecure piece of software
Its just happened that this one latched on a trend well and went viral, cease and desist from its name accelerated the virality
I'm extremely curious what OpenAI's offer was. The utility of more money is diminished when you're already pretty wealthy.
It probably also makes him more attractive to OpenAI et al. - he's not just some guy who's going to have all sorts of risks earning a lot of money for the first time.
OpenAI has two real competitors: Anthropic in the enterprise space and Google in the consumer space. Google fell far behind early on and ceded a lot of important market share to ChatGPT. They're catching up, but the runaway success of ChatGPT provides OpenAI with a huge runway among consumers.
In the enterprise space, OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft has been a gold mine. Every company on the planet has a deep relationship with Microsoft, so being able to say "hey just add this to your Microsoft plan" has been huge for OpenAI.
The thing about enterprise is the stakes are high. Every time OpenAI signals that they're not taking AI safety seriously, Anthropic pops another bottle of champagne. This is one of those moments.
Again, I doubt it matters much either way, but if OpenAI does end up blowing up, decisions like this will be in the large pile of reasons why.
Claiming Dario is the bad guy in any context is kind of a tough characterization to agree with, if even a fraction of one interview with him has been seen.
To stay on point though: OpenAI hiring OpenClaw creator does seem to lean away from a serious enterprise benefit and towards a more consumer-based tack, which is a curious business move considering the original comments perspective of OpenAI.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
OpenClaw and Claude Code aren't solving the same problems. OpenClaw was about having a sandbox, connecting it to a messenger channel, and letting it run wild with tools you gave it.
People would wake up to their agent having built something cool the night before or automate their workflow without even asking for it.
OpenClaw was about having the agent operate autonomously, including initiating its own actions and deciding what to do. Claude Code was about waiting for instructions and presenting results.
“Just SSH into Claude Code” is like the famous HN comment that didn’t understand why anyone was interested in DropBox because you could do backups with shell scripts.
The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.
Or just plain recklessness.
The guy is creative, but this is really just following the well known pattern of acquiring/hiring bright minds if only to prevent your competition from doing the same.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.
With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.
Acquihires haven't worked that way for a while. The new acquihire game is to buy out a few key execs and then have them recruit away the key developers, leaving the former company as a shell for someone else to take over and try to run.
Also OpenClaw was not a one-person operation. It had several maintainers working together.
This has been travelling on a bunch of platforms, but the niche-ish ones have fairly low engagement numbers.. in the grand scheme of things.
Hello, fellow humans
Honestly, Anthropic really dropped the ball here. They could have had such an easy integration and gained invaluable research data on how people actually want to use AI — testing workflows, real-world use cases, etc. Instead, OpenAI swoops in and gets all of that. Massive missed opportunity.
For OpenAI it’s a smart move, snatch up the creator of a viral and ride on its coat tails for the hype.
My guess if this guy has taken a job for maybe $1M, effectively handing over the crown jewels to Altman for nothing.
OpenAI must be laughing their heads off.
Beads and blankets.
MongoDB – ~30 B USD
Docker – Private (~2+ B USD last valuation)
Redis Ltd. – Private (~2 B USD last valuation)
Grafana Labs – Private (~6 B USD last valuation)
Confluent (Apache Kafka) – ~11 B USD
Cloudera (Apache Hadoop) – 5.3 B USD (acquired)
SUSE Linux – ~2.5 B USD
Red Hat – 34 B USD (acquired)
HashiCorp – 6.4 B USD (acquired)
lol. what?
What he did is incredible, he grabbed attention of the tech community like no other...however good or bad he was at it and making it secure.
He was curious and experimental and got lucky!
The bankrupt company sponsors anything, that sounds credible.
What I am missing is distribution. It seems impossible to get traction nowadays on social media, regardless how good your product is.
Any feedback is much appreciated.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
Yeah, these systems are going to get absolutely rocked by exploits. The scale of damage is going to be comical, and, well, that's where we are right now.
Go get 'em, tiger. It's a brave new world. But, as with my 10 year old, I need to make sure the credit cards aren't readily available. He'd just buy $1k of robux. Who knows what sort of havoc uncorked agentic systems could bring?
One of my systems accidentally observed some AWS keys last night. Yeah. I rotated them, just in case.
How to mitigate this concern?
Prompt injection is a thing, and a lot of vibe coding, Gas Town, Ralph-loop enthusiasts are vehemently ignoring the risk believing they’re getting ahead.
I wouldn’t worry and just observe the guinea pigs doing their thing. Most of them will run around expending all their energy, some will get eaten by snakes, and you’ll be able to learn a lot, wait for the environment to mature, then spend your energy, instead.
It should run on its own VPS with full root access, given api keys which have spending limits, given no way for strangers to talk to it. I treat it as a digital assistant, a separate entity, who may at some point decide to sell me out as any human stranger might, and then share personal info under that premise.
And every time I reach the same conclusion: it's a WhatsApp/Telegram/etc wrapper for LLMs.
Until next time!
Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.
What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.
Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.
I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.
If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.
And that I guess is what he'll get to do now.
* OpenClaw is a straw man for AGI *
furthermore Sam Altman desperately needs something cool again at OpenAI
The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .
Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.
The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective
The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.
Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.
In the past, people wanting to sign a juicy contract at a FAANG were told to spend hours everyday on Leetcode.
Now? Just spend tokens until you build something that get enough traction to be seen by one of the big labs!
Gaining traction is the tough part.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
money or morals, choose one
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
Join us in the wait list, mate. In the meantime, maybe we could make a whole community and try to make our own start-ups.
Please dispense with the “change the world” bullshit.
I understand that it’s healthy to celebrate your personal victories but in this context with this bro going to OpenAI to make 7 figures, maaaan I don’t think this guy needs our clicks.
On top of that there’s a better than 50% chance OpenAI suffocates the open source project and the alternative will be a paid privacy nightmare.
And I’m not going to celebrate the success of multimillionaires who are quitting their passion projects to join the evil empire to “change the world” by making the lives of the working class worse and transferring more wealth to the top.
Someone in OP’s position of success has the means to make the choice to not work with a Palantir collaborator, but they chose to go for it.
The fact that I make a declining share of peanuts compared to this AI bro selling his soul to serial liar Sam Altman isn’t “about me,” it’s about “me” as in “the working class.”
This is the core of why it’s distasteful for the most excessively privileged people and their enablers to celebrate their wins, and why I feel no obligation to celebrate alongside them nor keep my distaste for them to myself.
Regular people are beyond sick and tired of tech bros like OP trying to “change the world” by shipping our jobs to data centers and shoving depression apps down our childrens’ throats. Now they want us to celebrate with them as they get paid massive salaries and stock awards to design the robots that will finally replace the last bastions of human interaction and craftsmanship.
OpenAi is curating ChatGpt very well, which honestly I like, compared to other companies, maybe expect Anthropic, they are not "caring" that much
No company could ship anything like OpenClaw as a product because it was a million footguns packaged with a self-installer and a couple warnings that it can't be trusted for anything.
There's a reason they're already distancing themselves from it and saying it's going to an external foundation
The question is whether OpenClaw will actually stay open in the world of 'Open'Ai.
Thank you, we already fucked. I am a hypocrite of course.
This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.
This is a vibe coded agent that is replicable in little time. There is no value in the technology itself. There is value in the idea of personal agents, but this idea is not new.
The value is in the hype, from the perspective of OpenAI. I believe they are wrong (see next points)
We will see a proliferation of personal agents. For a short time, the money will be in the API usage, since those agents burn a lot of tokens often for results that can be more sharply obtained without a generic assistant. At the current stage, not well orchestrated and directed, not prompted/steered, they are achieving results by brute force.
Who will create the LLM that is better at following instructions in a sensible way, and at coordinating long running tasks, will have the greatest benefit, regardless of the fact the OpenClaw is under the umbrella of OpenAI or not.
Claude Opus right now is the agent that works better for this use case. It is likely that this will help Anthropic more than OpenAI. It is wise, for Anthropic, to avoid burning money for an easily replicable piece of software.
Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor? And it was much more a true product than OpenClaw.
Soon, personal agents will be one of the fundamental products of AI vendors, integrated in your phone, nothing to install, part of the subscription. All this will be irrelevant.
In the mean time, good for the guy that extracted money from this gold mine. He looks like a nice person. If you are reading this: congrats!
(throw away account of obvious reasons)
of course--i use it every day. are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR...
But base vs code is fine for that too
Who?
> are you implying Cursor is dead? they raised $2B in funding 3 months ago and are at $1B in ARR
That is the problem. It doesn't matter about how much they raised. That $2B and that $1B is paying the supplier Anthropic and OpenAI who are both directly competing against them.
Cursor is operating on thin margins and still continues to losing money. It's now worse that people are leaving Cursor for Claude Code.
In short, Cursor is in trouble and they are funding their own funeral.
Whoever stands in front of the customer ultimately wins. The rest are just cost centers.
Meaning, these products are being created by representatives of the kind of people carrying the most privilege and having the least impact of negative decisions.
For example, Twitter did not start sanitizing location data in photos until women joined the team and indicated that such data can be used for stalking.
White rich bros do not get stalked. This problem does not exist in their universe.
The future is both amazing and shitty.
Hope OpenClaw continues to evolve. It is indeed an amazing piece of work.
And I hope sama doesn't get his grubby greedy hands on OpenClaw.
I feel like we're living in one of those breathless futurist interviews from a 1994 issue of Wired mag.
I'm assuming there's a typo here, because I can't imagine a flight from LAX to SKO at all, let alone one that goes anywhere close to Honolulu. But I can't figure out what this was supposed to be.
Once my Olares One is here, will also be using local LLMs on open models.
Good for him, but no particular geniusness.
The reason is that he paid every AI "influencer" to promote it. Within the span of a week, the project went from being completely unknown to every single techbro jumping on it as the next "thing that will change the world". It also gained around 70k github stars in that time.
In the age of AI, everything is fake.
The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.
Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.
Happy to answer architecture questions.
Props to this guy for scamming Altman this hard without writing a single line of code, or really doing anything at all other than paying for a bunch of github stars and tweets/blogposts from fellow grifters.
There is literally no need to shit on ur mom like that. Sorry your mom sucks at tech but can we please stop using this as a euphemism?
AFAIK Anthropic won't let projects use the Claude Code subscription feature, but actually push those projects to the Claude Code API instead.
I'd been having conversations with ChatGPT about OpenClaw, nothing remarkable or extraordinary. Then I started a new conversation to talk about a different aspect, and GPT assumed I wanted to talk about some old PC game.
To disambiguate, I now had to refer to OpenClaw.ai. I asked it if it had some new system directive about this, and of course it denied it. Today we learn OpenAI has hired the OpenClaw developer, and he's "turning the project over to a foundation"
What’s fascinating is the pattern we’re seeing lately: people who explored the frontier from the outside now moving inside the labs. That kind of permeability between open experimentation and foundational model companies seems healthy.
Curious how this changes the feedback loop. Does bringing that mindset in accelerate alignment between tooling and model capabilities — or does it inevitably centralize more innovation inside the labs?
Either way, congrats. The ecosystem benefits when strong builders move closer to the core.
I would expect someone who "strikes gold" like this in a solo endeaver to raise money, start a company, hire a team. Then they have to solve the always challenging problem of how to monetize an open-source tool. Look at a company like Docker, they've been successful but they didn't capture more than a small fraction of the commercial revenue that the entire industry has paid to host the product they developed and maintain. Their peak valuation was over a billion dollars, but who knows by the time all is said and done what they'll be worth when they sell or IPO.
So if you invent something that is transformative to the industry you might work really hard for a decade and if you're lucky the company is worth $500M, if you can hang onto 20% of the company maybe it's worth $100M.
Or, you skip the decade in the trenches and get acqui-hired by a frontier lab who allegedly give out $100M signing bonuses to top talent. No idea if he got a comparable offer to a top researcher, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. Even a $10M package to skip a decade of risky & grueling work if all you really want to do is see the product succeed is a great trade.