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).

> 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

money or morals, choose one

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.

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.

Good for him, but no particular geniusness.

(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.

https://xcancel.com/steipete/status/2023154018714100102

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.

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.

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?

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

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.)

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.

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

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]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9vRCYtzYD8&t=2673s

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.

Its just happened that this one latched on a trend well and went viral, cease and desist from its name accelerated the virality

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776848

To be fair, when used in retrospect, this applies to just about any big tech company

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 :)

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw#community

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.

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"?

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)

So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

lol. what?

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.

People can do that? I always assumed Lex was a CIA psyop to experiment with the ability to make people sleep on demand.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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

A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.

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.

Gaining traction is the tough part.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And every time I reach the same conclusion: it's a WhatsApp/Telegram/etc wrapper for LLMs.

Until next time!

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.

Or just plain recklessness.

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.