I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human.
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.
It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.
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.
Or.
One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!
After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.
But I’m only programming a text viewer.
Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.
I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.
"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.)
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
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.
I was nodding my head agreeing with you but then remembered John Carmack, who seems to deliver both... He takes great pride in writing ground breaking code, for industry defining products.
The opposite is not true though: successful products might have messy codebases, but that doesn’t mean, that messy codebases lead to successful products, or that quality doesn’t matter.
Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.
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.
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
> 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 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.
He's not hired to code. He has taste for "what works" in these types of things. They want him to apply that taste - maybe making new services or fixing old.
I like your optimism but no - you are still hired via "excels at hackerrank", every big tech company first interview is exactly this, no matter how many projects your delivered and how useful you are/were at you previous job.
> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful.
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.
But it also looks like these companies value and pay for the tech bro version of a snake oil consultant. And that you still have to have a lot of things going in your favour for your own brand of slop to elevate you to tech celebrity status. I don't see anybody who isn't already well-connected or financially comfortable pulling this off because nobody who has something to lose will slop their way to the top.
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.
Delivering a product is one thing. Continuing to upgrade it and maintain it indefinitely is another. Good quality code makes it easier to make improvements and changes as time goes on. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or an LLM.
Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad
>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products
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".
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.
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.
> 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.
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.
It took me a while to realise that most people don't care how it's done or how it works they just want something useful and working (even if it's vibe coded or duct taped)
>>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank
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.
Should I be sad or rather relieved that grifters will be able to grift without my help? I would just accept the reality and reeducate myself to some other field where hard engineering is still required, but I'm afraid AI will advance faster than my degree.
You are replying to someone whose account name is tabs_or_spaces, which in itself is so ironic that I have no word for it.
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.
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
I mean, you're right but at the same time you're talking about something completely different. Software with security vulnerabilities is not a useful product. You don't address the raised issues.
I think you are really just describing an outlier. Most people really do get hired for the first thing. This is a situation where someone went viral and got a job. I don't think this is sort of the rule. The thing about "proven ability to deliver ..." is just kind of cope recruiters tell themselves and other people. It's nice but its not how things cache out in the real world.
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.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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.
Someone that makes vibe coding tools would presumably want to have vibe coders on staff? If you're just not into the whole enterprise that's one thing but I'm not understanding what's fishy about that.
This should be a wake up call. A product's value is not a function of its code elegance. Nobody who matters notices the code, or cares. This is hugely inspiring to the most lazy+clever engineers, because it frees up so many thinking calories. Instead of trying to perfectly choreograph every bit of architecture to optimize for 1M concurrent users, you can spend 0.1 of the time and get things out the door, where you learn if spending even a minute of your time was worth it. Even better, when you realize tech debt is something that never needs to be paid down, you can focus all your energy on evolving your thinking patterns, not being bogged down in refactoring things that you've spiritually moved on from. An engineer's time is so precious; it needs to be spent thinking, not coding.
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.
You are most likely confusing OpenClaw with Moltbook, which is the project that had the most glaring vulnerabilities. But even if OpenClaw was full of holes it would not matter.
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.
What vision? Everyone and their mother has been trying to build useful AI assistants and personal CRMs since computers were invented - way before LLMs. He glued it together, and he succeeded because he executed before anyone else.
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.
Not Moltbook, ClawHub. Over 15% of ClawHub skills were malicious at one point, including the most downloaded. And they haven't even tried to solve prompt injections.
> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company
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.
> 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.
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?
The guy has a long history of building popular products, long before vibe coding became possible. He is certainly good at writing code manually as well.
I think you’re conflating things. You probably are not jealous but rather frustrated and coming from a point of a false dichotomy trying to equal your position to his. If you were to stop and actually compare your lives you would likely find very different humans. It’s easy to fall into this trap sometimes, don’t let it get into your head. Be grateful for being you and enjoy what life has to offer you instead.
I see a guy who has shown evidence that he has the skill and agency to successfully ship and scale a project that people want, pushing the frontier tools to their limits. That is valuable.
Pete didn’t just vibe code, he took his many years of engineering experience and applied it to build a ton of products, pushing the boundaries of todays models and harnesses.
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.
You focused only on the past few months of his career, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. He was active for more than a decade, from early iOS development days to having a fairly successful exit.
So after almost two decades of hard work, it is not really fair to say he just vibe-coded his way into OpenAI.
Was he? Openclaw is now dead, right? The software will now die. No-one's going to maintain it.
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.
Really surprised by all the comments here, they didnt hire him because of the amazing security openclawd had, but because he's one of the first one's who made a truly personal assistant that's actually valueable to people.
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.
There were some comments somewhere below about that virality being bought though. I don't know how true that is or where those commenters got their information. If you look at google trends though there is practically no mention of ClawdBot before around January 23, even though the project was released in November.
Fake engagement doesn't need to be bought anymore.
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.
> vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities
> 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.
I’m surprised to read this comment. I totally get why openAI hired the guy, IMO its a brilliant hire and I wish Meta would have fought more to get him (at the same time Meta is very good at copying and I think they need more people pushing products and experiments and less processes, they’ve been traumatized by cambridge analytica and can’t experiment anymore)
They're buying him for his ideas, not for his ability to code. And if his stars are bought, then they're buying him also for his black hat marketing, I guess...
He didn't specify the role he was hired for, code is just a means to an end. Perhaps OpeaAI wanted him for his vision (I like to think so) or just to make up for the public support they're losing (I hope not). In either case, it may not be an engineering role.
Well, once you learn that hard work does not pay, it’s really your own fault if you keep believing in it.
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.
If you want to make a million bucks a year then go put in three consecutive quarters of demonstrable lift on a renenue-adjacent metric at Stripe or Uber.
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.
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.
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.
What he built is genuinely interesting even if it is not something I would want to give all my credentials to. Makes sense for OpenAI to hire someone who has shown he can build something a lot of people want even they don’t know how to make an even half secure app out of it.
They probably think he has the right judgement of where UX would need to move to. That is easily more valuable for them than any coding.
It does not matter that he vibe-coded it. It does not matter if any stars/twitter post were bought. He generated hype and that's what big AI company need at the moment. They hire him, they give a cut on that hype. If he's no good (at generating any hype) in the coming months, he'll be gone. It's hype all the way down.
I was half-jokingly telling someone the other day (before I knew what OpenClaw was or anything about this story), that as the ability to code is becoming commoditized, sales and marketing skills are going to be more important, shifting power from techies to influencers and we may see Mr Beast become a software powerhouse.
You don’t need the lucky shot. But luck needs room to happen. What you need to grow into is becoming a leader. Mentor others, lead by example, suggest new things and build prototypes for show and tell. All that is actually the growth path for good senior software engineers, not becoming a middle manager creating Excel sheets.
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.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky
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
What's wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber? At this point, it's really a very small TV channel. And YouTube essentially allows for an infinite number of these very small TV channels, unlike traditional TV.
> way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers
You can replace "influencers" with "wanting to be popular". That is as old as time. To me, if you look closely at (social media) influencers, they are nothing more than people who were popular in high school and managed to extend it for a few years with the use of social media.
Ugh. Have we all forgotten that jealousy is the absolute opposite of a good virtue. Why does this get upvoted? Hacker News in a truly despicable state these days when this is what bubbles to the top. It saddens me to see that all the good people here have left or stopped participating. When we hear how rotten social media is, this also includes HN.
I don't think he is hired for coding, he is hired for the product. It is not that he is going to join a product team and code, he probably will lead and influence the product, where other software engineers can help to fulfill.
As I understand Peter had already early retired because of a successful startup exit and presumably has more money than he knows what to do with. Does that help make you feel less jealous on him getting a job at oai?
It's the old story: evil, irresponsible behaviour has a higher chance of success, than being good and responsible. AIs recent history is a good example. Google had the lead, but lost it (temporary) to OpenAI, because Google was responsible and were not willing to open pandoras box. Apple seems to have something similar to OpenClaw for a while now, but withholds from releasing it, because it's too unsecure. History is full of people burning the world for their own greed, and getting rewarded for it; and they then call it "taking risks" and "thinking outside the box"... I think the underlying reason might be in too many people thinking there is some level of competence behind the irresponsible behaviour and it's alls just controlled harm or something like that.
Whenever technically more capable folks diss the growth of a non technical person into bigger roles, I'm obligated to post this Steve Jobs video being asked about Java.
Errr its always been extremely true that social networking brings success. With far more value return than writing great code nobody knows about or uses.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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...
Exactly. This whole thing just seems like a repeat of Flappy Bird to me. What was the "lesson" of Flappy Bird for game developers? That you should make very small, very simple games? How has that worked out for the vast majority of copycats who tried? The truth is there isn't any lesson, other than "sometimes people play the lottery, get lucky and win". Most people who play won't, though.
I wouldn't necessarily expect him to be hired as their lead developer, but I think he would be a good product manager. He's clearly created something people want and see potential for.
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.
dont be jealous. working for some evil corporate is soulsucking for most humans. Only few thrive in such environments. most will try to get quick $$ and exit before they feel completely dead inside.
> We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
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.
not sure why i find a lot of these types of comments lately, just a sign of the times i guess? criticism sure, but to reduce all of his work as if it were a paragraph prompt or something, that's something else.
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 such a strange take to be the top comment of “hacker” news. Why are we shaming someone who “hacked” something together and made it open source?
> Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed?
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.
Maybe it still is supposed to sound fancy to say you didn't read any of the code. The guy definitely could very deeply understand, read and edit the code, he developed the industrial standard liberal for PDF editing (used by Dropbox etc).
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.
The lesson here is to make something people want. All else is forgiven is the product is something people really want - the product market fit most of us never achieve.
That's such a bizarre thing to claim when offshoring software development has historically been a huge failure. You've always needed competent technical staff with even more demanding management requirements to stand a chance.
What percentage of programming job interviews every went like that? They ask fizz buzz, they ask DP, they system analysis and design, and some culture fit. Maybe some people might ask this B-school type stuff but who is out there verifying deliverables of people from previous jobs?
What sense it made to do something like Instagram? There were already N social networks where you could share photos. No technical excellence was needed. It was just momentum, being in the right incubator, and so forth... I understand what you are saying, but it has been always like that.
Well - no. There are some products where the product itself was relatively simple to build, and the rest was product-market fit. Those are the easy ones technically, but that's not the only type of successful product. YouTube wouldn't be working today if it broke all the time under load.
Good move. OpenClaw is alpha quality, very dangerous, super useful and super fun - which amplifies the danger. It’s a disaster waiting to happen and a massive risk for a solo dev to take on. So best to trade it for a killer job offer and transfer all that risk.
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.
He's not really trading anything though. He was hired by OpenAI. OpenClaw will remain free and open source (it's the first line of his blog post). He says that OpenAI will allow him to work on it and already sponsors it so maybe that means he'll have time to improve it, I guess.
Given he's moving to SF to work in their office I presume part of it is he'll be working in-house on their commercial replacement, and will continue to cover costs on the OSS version which he's free to work on. His recent posts make it clear they've got plans for their own stuff to replace it.
It really is quite funny though isn't it. Yes, it's a fucking hand grenade that will blow up at any moment. It's perfect for a one man band startup. Because there's massive upside and at the end of the day if it blows up he's just back to sqaure one, what did you expect from a 1 man band.
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.
OpenClaw is more like an art project than a consumer product. It has shown clear consumer product demand. The next step is making it a safer consumer product.
While that might take it a little too far, Lex surely is a dangerous individual. On various occasions did he sympathize with the war and terror that Russia is doing in Ukraine. I do not click on any of his content because I will not support these (and a few other questionable, to say the least) views of his. Also his image of an MIT researcher is hilarious.
Well that was a crazy month. Kudos to this guy for recognising his goals which is not to start another company. It is very easy to get intoxicated by the idea of something being so successful that you can capture the value, especially after having struggled for so long with a previous company. I think it's every founder's dream to like just hit lightning. But this stuff is incredibly stressful and it's important to be able to look into the future and ask yourself. Is this what I want? Is this what I need in my life? And the answer here is no. This person can deliver value elsewhere quite easily and get the reward without as much stress. We should all take a lesson from this whirlwind journey. Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it. A lot of people feel a little bit of envy or jealousy. I used to feel that when I was working on something and I saw other people succeed and I wished that that had happened to me. But if it was meant for you it would find you. And the fact that it hasn't found you means that it was not meant for you. We all have our role to play. There is something important for us to do and that's not necessarily something that is world famous or amasses thousands of GitHub stars. If after reading this it's still bothering you. Take a walk and reflect on the good things in your life.
> Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it.
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.
This feels like such a defeatist take. The ideas time had come. For luck to strike you have to be in the market for it. Just keep shipping and playing. We don’t “all have our role to play” but there are a lot of roles that need playing
But that's the point it's not defeatist. It's more about saying there is something for you to do. There is a role for you to play but that's not necessarily the role that you see somebody else playing. So sometimes we see somebody else doing something and we think whoa that person is successful and we become envious of that and then we want to emulate that. But we forget that maybe that's not what's intended for us. Maybe that person is really good at that thing or that's what was for them. But for us we might be good at something else and there might be something that we are uniquely positioned to do so. The point is not to be defeatist but not to focus on what somebody else has right. Focus on what you have and focus on what your ability is and focus on what's going to improve your quality of life and the people around you and don't focus on the negative aspects of what is effectively fomo
This is the same "heating" effect as social media algorithms apply to random podcasters (e.g. Joe Rogan) - those isolated cases of success which happen to be completely synthetic provide an 'american dream' for the system, whose success depends on the Fantasy being alive and believed in by those who are its customers/product
I like the parallel as Joe Rogan is a trained actor who mastered the art of incorporating all the success factors of its predecessors. He saw obscure podcasts gaining intense viewership, he literally mimicked the patterns and merged it into the "best" of all. Even made his more mainstream, while fooling millions to feel they are part of a niche enlighten resistance community.
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.
> You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
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.
Memory. I have built up so many scripts and crons and integrated little programs and memories with open claw it would be difficult to migrate to some other system.
This is the sort of thing employers are failing on. They sign contracts that assume employees are going to be logging in and asking questions directly.
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.
And OpenClaw is nothing revolutionary. It’s all shit we could do before OpenClaw. It’s just that no one was stupid enough to do it. Now everyone has gone crazy.
I think the point was about the frequency of switching your frontend. With a proper frontend you can switch the backend on each request if you want, but usually people will stay with one main-interface of their choice. For AI, OpenClaw, Moltic, Rowboat are now such a frontend, but not many will use them all at once.
It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
Things that arn't happening any time soon but need to for actual product success built on top:
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.
If you step back and look at this whole thing from a marketing and cash flow perspective, I think it makes a lot more sense.
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.
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.
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?
It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.
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.
As an experiment, I set it up with a z.ai $3/month subscription and told it to do a tedious technical task. I said to stay busy and that I expect no more than 30 minutes of inactivity, ever.
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.
$3 z.ai subscription? Sounds like it already burned $3k
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.
There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
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.
> Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is it’s sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
> 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.
Great products sell methodology, not just code. Great developers produce methodology. So what OpenAI bought isn't a developer, but a meta-methodology owner. It's a bet on Peter's mind to produce leading methodology for agent applications.
The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.
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).
The game theory here is that either OpenAI acquires this thing now, or someone else will. It doesn't matter whether they could replicate it. All of the major players can and probably will replicate OpenClaw in their own way and make their thing incredibly scalable and wonderful. But OpenClaw has a gigantic following and it's relevant in this moment. For a trivial amount of money (relatively speaking), OpenAI gets to own this hype and direct it toward their models and their apps. Had they not succeeded here, Anthropic or Google would have gladly directed the hype in their direction instead, and OpenAI would be licking its wounds for some time trying to create something equivalently shiny.
I think that’s fair.. building a competing product would likely be relatively easy and inexpensive. But that’s true for most software now: it’s becoming easier to build, and the barriers to entry are lower.
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.
Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.
Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
We're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it.
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
how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
This is a smart play. Models aren't going to be a moat, performance is too easy to replicate and all the big players (and even OSS) are following quickly behind. The only moat that will be stable is having something with network effects and adoption overhead, something that can grab eyes and has sticking power. This was probably the idea behind Sora (although it hasn't worked).
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.
peter's claw is a lot more than just a wrapper around my slop.
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 :)
Other than the response from Mario itself, pi is very frequently showcased at meetups organised by Peter/OpenClaw community, so there is definitely crediting involved.
There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing.
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
I think this comment misses that OpenAI hired the guy, not the project.
"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.
Not only that, his output is insane, he has more active projects than I bother to count and more than 70k commits last year. He's probably one of, if not the best, vibe coding evangelist.
This comment is filled with speculation which I think is mostly unfounded and unnecessarily negative in its orientation.
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.
> To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature
So because Peter said the next version is going to be safe means it'll be safe? I prefer to judge people by their actions more than their words. The fact that OpenClaw is not just unsafe but, as you put it, infamously so, only begs the question "why wasn't it built safely the first time?"
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
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 the blog says @steipete sold his SOUL.md for Sam Altman’s deal and let down the community.
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.
I don't mean to be cynical, but I read this move as: OpenAI scared, no way to make money with similar product, so acqui-hire the creator to keep him busy.
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.
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.
This is to avoid open claw liability and because hiring people (often with a license to their tech or patents) is the new smarter way to acquire and avoid antitrust issues
To give you an idea of the scale, OpenClaw is probably one of the biggest developments in open source AI tools in the last couple of months. And given the pace of AI, that's a big deal.
The tech industry is broad, and if you are using OpenAI in a consumer and personal manner you weren't the primary persona amongst whom the conversation around OpenClaw occurred.
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.
I think they want the man and ideas behind the most useful AI tool thus far. Surprisingly, and OpenAI may see this - it is a developer tool.
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.
I am not a fan of OpenAI but they are not exactly hiring a security researcher. They are hiring an aspiring builder who has built something the masses love. They can always provide him the structure and support he needs to make his products secure. It's not mutually exclusive (safety vs hiring him).
What is interesting about OpenClaw is it's architecture. It is like an ambient intelligence layer. Other approaches up until now have been VSCode or Chromium based integrations into the PC layer.
There’s plenty of straightforward reasons why OpenAI would want to do this, it doesn’t need to be some sort of malicious conspiracy.
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.
I suspect Anthropic was seeing a huge spike of concurrent model usage at a too fast of a rate that claude code just doesn't do, CC is rather "slow" at api calls per minute. Also lots and lots of cache, the sheer amount of cache that claude does is insane.
> 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.
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.
Is he? My impression of Clawdbot was it was a good idea but not particularly technically impressive or even well-written. I had all kinds of issues setting it up.
> 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.
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.
Most of these are good callouts, but I think it is best for us to look at the evolution of the AI segment in the same manner as "Cloud" developed into a segment in the 2000s and 2010s.
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.
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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).
> 2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move.
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.
Twitter is negative in general, but generally when a project like this gets bought it marks the end of the project. The acquirer always says something about how they don't plan to change anything, but it rarely works that way.
(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.
I am fine with the founder joining OpenAI, he gets to get paid regardless.
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.
Anyone who likes Openclaw will be upset that it’s getting acquired and inevitably destroyed. Anyone who dislikes it will be annoyed that the creator is getting so rewarded for building junk. The only people who would like this are OpenAI fans, if there even are any.
After two weeks of viral posts, articles, and Mac Mini buying sprees, as it's been happening up to now for every AI product that was not an LLM, it kinda disappeared from the consciousness-- as well as from the tooling, probably--of people.
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.
100% jealousy, similar to how anyone who posts a negative reaction to a crypto rugpull scam is just jealous that they didn't get to pull the scam themselves.
In this case I think it is largely jealousy, it's just a guy getting a new job at the end of the day.
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.
Obviously, all the people that disagree with your framing and see AI as the largest possible boost to mankind, giving us more assistance than ever.
From their standpoint, it's all the negativity that seems crazy. If you were against that, you'd have to have something wrong with you, in their view.
Hopefully most people can see both sides, though. And realize that in the end, probably the benefits will be slow but steady (no "singularity"), and also the dangers will develop slowly yet be manageable (no Skynet or economic collapse).
Imo Openclaw type AI has the most potential to benefit humans (automating drudgery while I own my data as opposed to creating gross simalcrums of human creativity). I suppose it's bad for human personal assistants, but I wouldn't pay for one of those regardless.
The generous interpretation is that Open AI is still safety aligned and they hired this guy because it's safer to have him inside and explain to him how reckless he's being, than having him far from "sphere of control".
The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.
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.)
In the AI space there isn’t a single killer app. EVERYTHING is open for disruption. ChatGPT was the start but OpenAI could create tons of other apps. They don’t need to wait for others to do so. People already want them to make a Slack replacement but I’m just wondering why none of the frontier labs are making a simple app platform that could be used to make custom apps like ChatGPT itself, or the Slack clone. Instead, they expect us to brute force app development through the API interface. Each frontier lab really needs their own Replit.
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
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.
OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.
> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.
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.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.
But... how is it even useful? Do you use it? Is it a good idea for anyone to, uh, use it? Is it a product that you or any other "vibe coder" cannot ~~build~~ tell Claude Code to build on the go, if he wants to communicate with Claude Code via WhatsApp for some reason? Sure, product doesn't need to be some sophisticated technology to be worth something, it could also just have user base because it succeeded at marketing, but does this particular product even benefit from network effects? What is this shit? Why anybody cares?
Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.
While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It can still deliver value for it's users while also requiring those same users to handle the insecurity of the software themselves (by either ignoring it or setting up sandboxes, etc to reduce the risk, and then maybe that reduced risk is weighed against the novelty and value of the software that then makes it worth it to the user to setup).
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.
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".
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?
Exactly! I was digging into Openclaw codebase for the last 2 weeks and the core ideas are very inspiring.
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.
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 am guessing there will be an OpenClaw "competitor" targeting Enterprise within the next 1-2 months. If OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini are fast and smart about it they could grab some serious ground.
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.
Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.
I don't agree that making your users run the binaries means security isn't your concern. Perhaps it doesn't have to be quite as buttoned down as a commercial product, but you can't release something broken by design and wash your hands of the consequences. Within a few months, someone is going to deploy a large-scale exploit which absolutely ruins OpenClaw users, and the author's new OpenAI job will probably allow him to evade any real accountability for it.
> being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”).
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?
Every single new tech industry thing has to learn security from scratch. It's always been that way. A significant number of people in tech just don't believe that there's anything to learn from history.
For my entire career in tech (~20 years) I have been technically good but bad at identifying business trends. I left Shopify right before their stock 4xed during COVID because their technology was stagnating and the culture was toxic. The market didn't care about any of that, I could have hung around and been a millionaire. I've been at 3 early stage startups and the difference between winners and losers was nothing to do with quality or security.
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.
I think you’re being unduly harsh on yourself. At least by the Shopify/COVID example. COVID was a black swan event, which may very well have completely changed the fortunes of companies like Shopify when online commerce surged and became vital to the economy. Shortcomings, mismanagement and bad culture can be completely papered over by growth and revenue.
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.
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 think your self reflection here is commendable. i agree on both counts.
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.
building this openclaw thing that competes with openai using codex is against the openai terms of service, which say you can't use it to make stuff that competes with them. but they compete with everyone. by giving zero fucks (or just not reading the fine print), bro was rewarded by the dumb rule people for breaking the dumb rules. this happens over and over. there is a lesson here
I don't know. It's more of a sharp tool like a web browser (also called a "user agent") - yes an inexperienced user can quickly get themselves into trouble without realizing it (in a browser or openclaw), yes the agent means it might even happen without you being there.
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"?
But in this case following security norms would be a mistake. The right thing to take away is that you shouldn't dogmatically follow norms. Sometimes it's better to just build things if there is very little risk
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 my unsubstantiated conspiracy theory regarding Clawd/Molt/OpenClaw is that the hype was bought, probably by OpenAI. I find it too convenient that not long after the phrase “the AI bubble“ starts coming into common speech we see the emergence of a “viral” use case that all of the paid influencers on the Internet seem to converge on at the same time. At the end of the day piping AI output with tool access into a while loop is not revolutionary. The people who had been experimenting with these type of set ups back when LangChain was the hotness didn’t organically go viral because most people knew that giving a language model unrestricted access to your online presence or bank account is extremely reckless. The “I gave OpenClaw $100 and now I bought my second Lambo. Buy my ebook” stories don’t seem credible.
So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.
The modern influencer landscape was such a boon for corporations.
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.
Your introspection missed the obvious point that you just wish you were him. Your resentment had nothing to do with security. It's a self-revelation that you don't actually care about it either and you resent wasting your time.
At the end of the day, he built something people want. That’s what really matters. OpenAI and Anthropic could not build it because of the security issues you point out. But people are using it and there is a need for it. Good on him for recognizing this and giving people what they want. We’re all adults and the users will be responsible for whatever issues they run into because of the lack of security around this project.
Admittedly, I might not be the.. targeted demographic here, but I can't say I understand what problem it solves, but even cursory read immediately flags all the way in which it can go wrong ( including recent 'rent a human hn post'). I am fascinated, and I wonder if that it is partially that fascination that drives current wave of adoption.
I will say openly: I don't get it and I used to argue for crypto use cases.
Well OpenClaw has ~3k open PRs (many touching security) on GitHub right now. Peter's move shows killer product UI/UX, ease of use and user growth trump everything. Now OpenAI with throw their full engineering firepower to squash those flaws in no time.
This is a normal reaction to unfairness. You see someone who you believe is Doing It Wrong (and I’d agree), and they’re rewarded for it. Meanwhile you Do It Right and your reward isn’t nearly as much. It’s natural to find this upsetting.
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.
Hey, as a security engineer in AI, I get where you're coming from.
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.
Security is always a cost center. We've seen multiple iterations of changes already impact security in the same ways over the last 20+ years. Nothing is different here and the outcomes will be the same: just good enough but always a step behind. The one thing that is a new lever to pull here is time, people need far less of it to make disastrous mistakes. But, ultimately, the game hasn't changed and security budgets will continue to be funneled to off the shelf products that barely work and the remainder of that budget will continue to go to the overworked and underpaid. Nothing really changes.
I think you should give your gut instinct more credit. The tech world has gotten a false sense of security from the big SaaS platforms running everything that make the nitty gritty security details disappear in a seamless user experience, and that includes LLM chatbot providers. Even open source development libraries with exposure to the wild are so heavily scrutinized and well-honed that it’s easy even for people like me that started in the 90s to lose sight of the real risk on the other side that. No more popping up some raw script on an Apache server to do its best against whatever is out there. Vibe coded projects trade a lot of that hard-won stability for the convenience of not having to consider some amount of the implementation details. People that are jumping all over this for anything except sandbox usage either don’t know any better, or forgot what they’ve learned.
I've been feeling this SO much lately, in many ways. In addition to security, just the feeling of spending decades learning to write clean code, valuing having a deep understanding of my codebase and tooling, thorough testing, maintainability, etc, etc. Now the industry is basically telling me "all that expertise is pointless, you should give it up, all that we care about it is a future of endless AI slop that nobody understands".
I've been feeling a similar kind of resentment often. My whole life I have prided myself on being the guy that actually bothers to read the docs and understand how shit works. Seems like the whole industry is basically saying none of that matters, no need to understand anything deeply anymore. Feels bad man.
AI slop will collapse under its own weight without oversight. I really think we will need new frameworks to support AI-generated code. Engineers with high standards will be needed to build and maintain the tools and technologies so that AI-written code can thrive. It's not game over just yet
> nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use
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.
good summary. i think you forgot heartbeat.md which powers some autonomy.
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
Most things that go viral actually have a concerted marketing push behind them. I suspect that was the case here. Something about the way people talked about it didn't come across as very genuine.
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
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.
Quick plus one for Capital One after also working there. They're by far the most tech-forward of all the larger financial institutions, and by virtue of being a FI they take data-security much more seriously than any other "tech" companies.
> 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 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.
You raised a good point I am now personally basically expecting to see this year ( next at the latest ). Some brave corporate will decide for millions of users to, uhh, liberate all users data. My money is not of that happening at Googles or OpenAIs of the world though. I am predicting it will be either be a bank or one of the data brokers.
With any luck, maybe this will finally be a bridge too fast, like what Amazon's superbowl ad did for surveillance conversation.
Sorry to break it to you but I would not trust any financial companies with my personal data. Simply because I’ve seen how they use data to build exploitive products in the past.
Well it’s not even just data, you have to trust actions taken if you want the assist to, you know, assist. I have been yoloing it and really enjoying it. Albeit from a locked off server.
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
Title could have mentioned this relates to Openclaw/moltbot/clawdbot too. Now the post became more relevant to read when I realized what this was about.
It indeed is the logical next step. It's been super interesting following him online and he's inspired a bunch of people to just go build stuff. Because why not.
I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.
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.
Can someone explain what value openclaw provides over like claude code? It seems like it's literally just a repackaged claude code (i.e. a for loop around claude) with a model selector (and I guess a few builtin 'tools' for web browsing?)
The main one is that you can run and/or host it remotely, unlike Claude Desktop. By this I mean, you can run OpenClaw on a service like Tailscale and protect your actual machine from certain security/privacy concerns and - regardless of the choice - you can connect your access to OpenClaw via any chat agent or SSH tunnel, so you can access it from a phone. If Claude Cowork comes to iOS/Android with a tunnel option, they can resolve this difference.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
Hmm, whats stopping you from running claude code on a separate machine you can ssh into? I don't understand that point at all, I do that all the time.
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.
OpenClaw is probably overkill if you just want to have a nice remote UI to access claude code, do tool call approvals. There are a ton of remote cli apps and guides to setup ssh access via tailscale etc, but none that just work with a nice remote web interface.
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)
From what I remember, the key differentiating features were:
- 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
Its a coding agent in a loop (infinite loops are rejected by coding agents usually) with access to your computer, some memory, and can communicate through telegram. That’s it. It’s brilliant though and he was the first to put it out there.
I see, so there's actually an additional for loop here, which is `sleep(n); check_all_conversations()`, that is not something claude code does for sure.
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.
For programmers or people who know computers quite well the difference to claude code is small i would say. But for "Normies" its magical that you can just ask your computer to do anything from anywhere (set timers, install stable diffusion, send you a specific doc in your download folder). You don't even have to write it, you can send it a voice message and it will install whisper or send it to the openai whisper api, etc. Obviously this is more then dangerous, but looking at what passwords people still choose today (probably also the reason why everything requires MFA nowadays), most people don't care about Security.
They serve different purposes. OpenClaw is supposed to be more of an autonomous sidekick assistant thing that can take instructions over different messenger channels. It can also be set up to take ongoing instructions and just churn on general directions.
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
True but between the lines I read some interesting points here.
Great it get the gold nugget but I found it curious how he dunked on the JVM after all the clones emerges with much more perfs and much less code/energy consumpution.
I just dislike Sam Altman, and I think he's just using this as a marketing ploy, which is more dishonesty from him. People keep saying OpenClaw is hype. I installed it, but I never tried to run it, and I don't know what the compelling reason is to. Supposedly you can talk to your agent from your iMessage? Who cares? Why not just talk to Claude Code?
The big draw of open claw is the memory architecture. Because you effectively start from scratch every time you open a new claude chat. Open Claw on the other hand, it compacts regularly, but also generates daily digests, and uses vector search, and then uses thoughtful memory retrieval techniques to add relevant context to your queries. Recent things get weighted more heavily, but full text search of all chats is still possible, and this is all managed automatically. Plus it uses markdown so the barrier to entry for manually auditing/modifying memories etc is very very low. If you say "can you check if my solar panel for my power generator arrive yet?" it is going to probably know what I'm talking about and go check my email for delivery notifications, based on conversations I've had with it about buying, ordering the solar panel etc. Claude is just going to ask clarifying questions since it has no idea what I am referencing.
I also not a Sam's fan for the same reason. But if he offered me a big check to work whatever project I wanted, I would not care about it being a "marketing ploy".
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
Personal agents disrupt OpenAI’s revenue plan. They had been planning to put ads in ChatGPT to make revenue. If users rapidly move to personal agents which are more resistant to ads, running on a blend of multiple models/compute providers - then they won’t be able to deliver their revenue promises.
Firstly, OpenAI has lacked focus so they're pursuing lots of different paths despite the obvious one (ads in chatgpt), like hiring Johnny Ive - a move that feels more WeWork than anything.
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.
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.
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.
These words may mean anything. From "get people extinct" to "make shit ton of money" for myself.
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.
It makes me more inclined to take the OP at face value, genuine interest in working on something similar and making it easier for everyone ('my mum') to use.
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.
I think he accepted that offer exactly for this reason . He feels he can have a bigger impact within OpenAI (and maybe become a billionaire in the medium run?) that creating his own business (again) out of OpenClaw.
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
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.)
Not sure. It's also plausible that OpenAI wants access to everybody's email, slack, whatsapp, telegram, github source code, whatever else this thing gets hooked up to.
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.
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
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.
I think it's at the final stage of software pump and dump [1]. OpenAI is probably hiring more for the reputation/marketing, rather than for any technical skills behind OpenClaw.
Cool. Good for him. I've been building agentic and observational systems and have been working to make them safe and layered in defense. And, well, I probably should have just said "fuck it" and put a disclaimer sticker on the front to let it fly.
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.
It likely won't matter much in the end, but I do think this could be a significant mistake for OpenAI.
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.
This take is imo very contrarian. Is Anthropic really popping champagne? They kind of look like the bad guys in this entire saga. If not the bad guys the enemy of fun and open source builders.
"popping champagne" is a figure of speech (perhaps hyperbole, or an idiom) meant to express not the literal act of "really popping champagne", but instead reaping the benefits of a seemingly poorly calculated business move by the other guys.
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.
I think peter was mostly using calude and to a lesser extent codex and claude was getting a free marketing. If he can just improve codex to work better with openclaw it will be a big win for openai. If he can make openai agent at par with openclaw with added safety/security it would be a big win too. Its a smart move by openai and i totally get it.
Peter was quite vocal on twitter about _only_ using Codex to develop OpenClaw, but Claude is what a majority of people were (are?) using to run the tool itself.
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
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. :)
> Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had.
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
He's been on a number of podcasts - lex recently, and is really emphatic about Codex as the breakthrough solution he relies on. I just looked and on the handful of podcasts there are about 2,000,000 views this past week and half or so.
It's how Steve Yegge became a "father of agentic orchestration" or something - there is some Canonical Universe Building exercise somewhere on twitter that just looks, for the lack of a better word, not rigorous. But good for all these people, I guess, for riding the hype to glory.
Got super inspired by this story and (sorry for the plug) decided to build comrade, a security-focused AI agent: https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel/comrade. I might be biased, but in my tests it managed to complete coding tasks (creating web apps from scratch) with less tools, which means less tokens, lower costs than openclaw.
What I am missing is distribution. It seems impossible to get traction nowadays on social media, regardless how good your product is.
Maybe one day there will be a book citing the weird influence of crusteans on the tech world of this era... crabs, lobsters, ... I'm holding on for the next crayfish!
Kudos to the guy for building such an awesome project in a very short amount of time. Of course he had to take some shortcuts to deliver, but at the end of the day, OpenClaw remains one of the best open source AI assistant implementations.
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
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.
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Major producers like OpenAI optimize for safety and brand reputation avoiding backlash. Open source projects optimize for raw capability and friction less experimentation. It is risky yes, but it allows for rapid innovation that strictly aligned models can't offer.
> You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container.
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.
I am surprised at the amount of comments that dismiss coding as just means to an end. Yes, every skill at the end of the day is a means to an end, but mastery of those skills is at the end what drives the vision. To know where you are going you need to know where you have been.
I really hoped he would support Europe’s startup ecosystem. Hopefully, he will at least bring stronger privacy standards to OpenAI, such as a policy that prohibits reading or analyzing user prompts or AI responses.
Don’t use it, or give it access to nothing important, therefore vastly limiting its potential. That’s the only way.
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.
We’re in a hype state where someone can “generate” millions of dollars in value in a month by making a meme prototype that scratches the itch just right, despite having no real competitive moat, application, value proposition or even semblance of a path to one.
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.
> 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.
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.
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
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.
Not sure what gives you that idea. One of our superpowers is that we're MIT licensed and deployable to private clouds, or even fully airgapped with 196gb+ of vram to run minimax on vllm + Gobii.
I think this ship has sailed pretty hard, by now. Pretty much any app you can possibly use, from iTerm to Slack, is sending data to third-party LLMs (sometimes explicitly, most times as small features here and there)
Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really.
Top comments are about money and misguided racism.
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.
Frankly, I hope he maximized the amount of money he made. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And nobody knows where AI is headed or if OpenAI even will be in existence in a few years given their valuation and the amount of $ they need to burn to keep up.
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
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.
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
What exactly is the grand vision for this person. He uses soaring language to describe changing the world for his grandma or something. What is his vision and vision that all these smiling people in his pictures have of the world? Is it complete economic collapse? Is it the complete destruction of society due to AI? Is that really so exciting?
I think the goal for OpenAI employees today should be to do as much good as possible with the ridiculous amount of investor money raised before the bubble goes pop.
The question is whether OpenClaw will actually stay open in the world of 'Open'Ai.
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
Dude builds an Anthropic-themed vibe-coded app (calls himself an "Anthropoholic"), it becomes insanely popular, and also happens to be completely insecure, Anthropic pressures him to change project's name twice, he does, and finally OpenAI acquires the inventor.
I was actually surprised to find a lot of people outside of my bubbles with this sentiment, from regular people from both of political spectrums to companies switching their llm provider (not us based)
Disappointing TBH. I completely understand that the OpenAI offer was likely too good to pass up, and I would have done the same in his position, but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw. The position he is about to enter requires skills in politics and bureaucracy, not engineering and design.
> but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw.
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 tone of this blog post reads as incredibly snobby, self-congratulatory, main character syndrome.
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.
It’s hard to celebrate the success of people who convey toxic Silicon Valley stereotypes.
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.
Peter is already a multimillionaire — he had an exit a few years ago for around $100 million. By his own account, he's spending $10,000+ per month on LLM tokens and other development costs. As long as OpenClaw stays open source and it remains possible to use all providers, this is totally fine by me.
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.
Damn. I just installed OpenClaw on my M2 Mac and hopped on a plane for our SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu. And Claw (that's the name of my new AI agent) kept me updated on my rebooking options and new terminal/gate assignments in SFO. All through the free WhatsApp access on United. AND, it refactored all my transferred Python code, built a graph of my emails, installed MariaDB and restored a backup from another PC. And, I almost forgot, fixed my 1337x web scrapping (don't ask) cron job, by CloudFlare-proofing it. All the while sitting in a shitty airline, with shitty food and shittier seats, hurtling across the pacific ocean.
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 asked it to check why the cron job kept failing, and it checked the cron payload and recommended reasons for the failure. I gave it the approval to go ahead and fix it. it tried different options (like trying different domains, and finally figured out the anti CF option).
the other tasks (like the MariaDB install and restore, python code refactoring) were a result of the initial requests made to Claw, like graphing my gmail email archives.
> hopped on a plane for SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu.
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.
OpenClaw is literally the most poorly conceived and insecure AI software anyone has ever made. Its users have had OpenClaw spend thousands of dollars, and do various unwanted and irreversible things.
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!
It was a success for the company, but it is unlikely to survive long term. Now people are all focusing on Claude Code and Codex. Cursor is surviving because there are many folks that can't survive a terminal session. And because we are still in a transition stage where people look at the code, but will look at the code every day less, and more at the results and the prompts. And at the quality of the agent orchestration / tools. I don't believe the Cursor future will be bright. Anyway: my example was about how fast things are forgotten in this space.
> 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.
I think Cursor is doing pretty well in the enterprise space. It seems much more useful than just throwing agents upon subagents on an unsuspecting task like Claude Code.
Cursor is fine, the example is about how things go out of hype in very little time. However I believe Cursor will not survive much. It is designed around a model that will not survive: that the AI "helps you writing code", and you review, and need an IDE like that. There are many developers that want an IDE and can't stand the terminal experience of Claude Code and Codex, but I don't believe most developers in the future will inspect closely the code written by the AIs, and things like Cursor will look like products designed for a transition step that is no longer here (already).
Never understood the hype. Good for the guy but what was the product really? And he goes on and on about changing the world. Gimme a break. You cashed out. End of story.
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.
This is easily the most successful tech grift I've ever seen.
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.
The branding is most likely intentional to be edgy (see also, Tesla's Model S, X, and Y), just with very shortsighted intentions because no one can pull that off in 2026 unless they are Elon Musk.
Edit: since this account has been posting almost exclusively flamebait and ideological/political battle comments, I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
they're (Anthropic) also the ones who have been routinely rug-pulling access from projects that try to jump onto the cc api, pushing those projects to oAI.
OpenClaw was one of the more interesting “edges” of the open AI tooling ecosystem — not because of scale, but because of taste and clarity of direction.
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 agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.
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.
This feels less like an acquisition and more like signaling. OpenClaw isn’t infrastructure, it’s an experiment, and its value is narrative: “look what one person can build with our models.” OpenAI gets PR, optional talent, and no obligation to ship something deterministic.
The deeper issue is that agent frameworks run straight into formal limits (Gödel/Turing-style): once planning and execution are non-deterministic, you lose reproducibility, auditability, and guarantees. You can wrap that with guardrails, but you can’t eliminate it. That’s why these tools demo well but don’t become foundations. Serious systems still keep LLMs at the edges and deterministic machinery in the core.
Meta: this comment itself was drafted with ChatGPT’s help — which actually reinforces the point. The model didn’t decide the thesis or act autonomously; a human constrained it, evaluated it, and took responsibility. LLMs add real value as assistive tools inside a deterministic envelope. Remove the human, and you get the exact failure modes people keep rediscovering in agent frameworks.
Exactly. Unfortunately, it seems like the ship has sailed towards exploitation of the current local maximum (I got GPUs and Terawatts, let’s go!) instead of looking for something better.
Something very interesting happened to me yesterday.
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"
I believe that the rename to OpenClaw happened after the cutoff date for pretty much all model's training data, so unless you say something that causes them to look it up they'll get it wrong and assume it's about the old PC game. I was messing around trying to get different models to setup an OpenClaw NixOS VM for me and had to disambiguate for most of the models I tried.
I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human.
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.
It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
> you get hired for your proven ability to (…)
No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)
The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.
https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html
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I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.
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.
Or.
After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.
Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.
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I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.
"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.)
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> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
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Fully disagree.
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.
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I was nodding my head agreeing with you but then remembered John Carmack, who seems to deliver both... He takes great pride in writing ground breaking code, for industry defining products.
We should all try and be more like John Carmack.
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The opposite is not true though: successful products might have messy codebases, but that doesn’t mean, that messy codebases lead to successful products, or that quality doesn’t matter.
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Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.
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.
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> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
> 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 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’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.
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He's not hired to code. He has taste for "what works" in these types of things. They want him to apply that taste - maybe making new services or fixing old.
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I like your optimism but no - you are still hired via "excels at hackerrank", every big tech company first interview is exactly this, no matter how many projects your delivered and how useful you are/were at you previous job.
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> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products
Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.
> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful.
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.
> your proven ability to deliver useful products
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.
This is exactly right.
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.
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Yes, Facebook's early PHP code looks pretty bad by today's standards
Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406#file-index-php
This is so not true.
But it also looks like these companies value and pay for the tech bro version of a snake oil consultant. And that you still have to have a lot of things going in your favour for your own brand of slop to elevate you to tech celebrity status. I don't see anybody who isn't already well-connected or financially comfortable pulling this off because nobody who has something to lose will slop their way to the top.
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.
Delivering a product is one thing. Continuing to upgrade it and maintain it indefinitely is another. Good quality code makes it easier to make improvements and changes as time goes on. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or an LLM.
Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad
>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products
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.
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
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.
And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.
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.
> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products
Or, in this case, just because they need a poster boy for their product, which isn't as good as they say it is.
> 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.
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.
It took me a while to realise that most people don't care how it's done or how it works they just want something useful and working (even if it's vibe coded or duct taped)
You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?
>>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank
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.
Tell that to the creator of Homebrew, Max Howell
> "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."
Should I be sad or rather relieved that grifters will be able to grift without my help? I would just accept the reality and reeducate myself to some other field where hard engineering is still required, but I'm afraid AI will advance faster than my degree.
Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.
> Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful
This is just wrong. Plenty of examples of crap code causing major economic losses.
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You are replying to someone whose account name is tabs_or_spaces, which in itself is so ironic that I have no word for it.
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.
...huh?
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
I mean, you're right but at the same time you're talking about something completely different. Software with security vulnerabilities is not a useful product. You don't address the raised issues.
I think you are really just describing an outlier. Most people really do get hired for the first thing. This is a situation where someone went viral and got a job. I don't think this is sort of the rule. The thing about "proven ability to deliver ..." is just kind of cope recruiters tell themselves and other people. It's nice but its not how things cache out in the real world.
Peter has been prolific and talented long before AI tools. I became familiar with his work a decade ago: https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView
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.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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.
Someone that makes vibe coding tools would presumably want to have vibe coders on staff? If you're just not into the whole enterprise that's one thing but I'm not understanding what's fishy about that.
pets.com moment
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This should be a wake up call. A product's value is not a function of its code elegance. Nobody who matters notices the code, or cares. This is hugely inspiring to the most lazy+clever engineers, because it frees up so many thinking calories. Instead of trying to perfectly choreograph every bit of architecture to optimize for 1M concurrent users, you can spend 0.1 of the time and get things out the door, where you learn if spending even a minute of your time was worth it. Even better, when you realize tech debt is something that never needs to be paid down, you can focus all your energy on evolving your thinking patterns, not being bogged down in refactoring things that you've spiritually moved on from. An engineer's time is so precious; it needs to be spent thinking, not coding.
It's not about the code, it's about the vibe.
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.
You are most likely confusing OpenClaw with Moltbook, which is the project that had the most glaring vulnerabilities. But even if OpenClaw was full of holes it would not matter.
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.
What vision? Everyone and their mother has been trying to build useful AI assistants and personal CRMs since computers were invented - way before LLMs. He glued it together, and he succeeded because he executed before anyone else.
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.
Not Moltbook, ClawHub. Over 15% of ClawHub skills were malicious at one point, including the most downloaded. And they haven't even tried to solve prompt injections.
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He also spent 13 years building [an] OCR document engine company (PSPDFKit) before becoming an "overnight" vibe coder success story.
His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.
He’s not just a “vibe coder”.
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> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company
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.
> 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.
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?
The guy has a long history of building popular products, long before vibe coding became possible. He is certainly good at writing code manually as well.
I genuinely think people on HN are having the misconception that vibe coding == don’t care about (the quality of) the code.
I like to think it’s the same as delegating implementation to someone else.
I think you’re conflating things. You probably are not jealous but rather frustrated and coming from a point of a false dichotomy trying to equal your position to his. If you were to stop and actually compare your lives you would likely find very different humans. It’s easy to fall into this trap sometimes, don’t let it get into your head. Be grateful for being you and enjoy what life has to offer you instead.
See that as winning the "startup lottery", that doesn't mean what he did is rational or smart, he just had a great outcome.
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.
I see a guy who has shown evidence that he has the skill and agency to successfully ship and scale a project that people want, pushing the frontier tools to their limits. That is valuable.
> a project that people want,
do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?
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Pete didn’t just vibe code, he took his many years of engineering experience and applied it to build a ton of products, pushing the boundaries of todays models and harnesses.
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.
If you just commit AI generated code without even looking at it it doesn't matter how many years of engineering experience you have.
You focused only on the past few months of his career, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. He was active for more than a decade, from early iOS development days to having a fairly successful exit.
So after almost two decades of hard work, it is not really fair to say he just vibe-coded his way into OpenAI.
If you read his blog you’ll find about a lot of his engineering decisions.
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.
Was he? Openclaw is now dead, right? The software will now die. No-one's going to maintain it.
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.
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I bet they did not invert a binary tree on the whiteboard, nor answered how many golf balls fit into a plane.
Really surprised by all the comments here, they didnt hire him because of the amazing security openclawd had, but because he's one of the first one's who made a truly personal assistant that's actually valueable to people.
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.
> vibecoded without reading any of the code
Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?
Going by how insanely viral OpenClaw has been on X, I don’t think any of the stars were bought
There were some comments somewhere below about that virality being bought though. I don't know how true that is or where those commenters got their information. If you look at google trends though there is practically no mention of ClawdBot before around January 23, even though the project was released in November.
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Fake engagement doesn't need to be bought anymore.
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.
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> vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities
> 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.
Read his backstory. He’s a high quality software engineer by background.
I’m surprised to read this comment. I totally get why openAI hired the guy, IMO its a brilliant hire and I wish Meta would have fought more to get him (at the same time Meta is very good at copying and I think they need more people pushing products and experiments and less processes, they’ve been traumatized by cambridge analytica and can’t experiment anymore)
They're buying him for his ideas, not for his ability to code. And if his stars are bought, then they're buying him also for his black hat marketing, I guess...
He didn't even have to be the one buying them. Lots of people benefit from a tool like OpenClaw getting popular.
The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?
He didn't specify the role he was hired for, code is just a means to an end. Perhaps OpeaAI wanted him for his vision (I like to think so) or just to make up for the public support they're losing (I hope not). In either case, it may not be an engineering role.
Well, once you learn that hard work does not pay, it’s really your own fault if you keep believing in it.
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.
If you want to make a million bucks a year then go put in three consecutive quarters of demonstrable lift on a renenue-adjacent metric at Stripe or Uber.
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.
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.
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.
What he built is genuinely interesting even if it is not something I would want to give all my credentials to. Makes sense for OpenAI to hire someone who has shown he can build something a lot of people want even they don’t know how to make an even half secure app out of it. They probably think he has the right judgement of where UX would need to move to. That is easily more valuable for them than any coding.
It does not matter that he vibe-coded it. It does not matter if any stars/twitter post were bought. He generated hype and that's what big AI company need at the moment. They hire him, they give a cut on that hype. If he's no good (at generating any hype) in the coming months, he'll be gone. It's hype all the way down.
I don't know this guy's abilities so can't comment on that, but looking at how much AI companies spend on marketing - that's a great hire.
Would you like to have it removed? https://github.com/oswarld/openshears
I think it is unfortunate that this is happening. After all the mishaps and wrongdoings I don't want see anyone joining openai
In my view this is just an aquihire to get a headline and take ownership over this trend. Yet another pivot to build hype.
I was half-jokingly telling someone the other day (before I knew what OpenClaw was or anything about this story), that as the ability to code is becoming commoditized, sales and marketing skills are going to be more important, shifting power from techies to influencers and we may see Mr Beast become a software powerhouse.
You don’t need the lucky shot. But luck needs room to happen. What you need to grow into is becoming a leader. Mentor others, lead by example, suggest new things and build prototypes for show and tell. All that is actually the growth path for good senior software engineers, not becoming a middle manager creating Excel sheets.
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.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky
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.
What's wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber? At this point, it's really a very small TV channel. And YouTube essentially allows for an infinite number of these very small TV channels, unlike traditional TV.
You can replace "influencers" with "wanting to be popular". That is as old as time. To me, if you look closely at (social media) influencers, they are nothing more than people who were popular in high school and managed to extend it for a few years with the use of social media.
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Vibe coding is just a tool - same with programming languages and compilers.
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.
>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.
And we have a company whose product should adhere to the highest security standards possible, hiring this guy.
Ugh. Have we all forgotten that jealousy is the absolute opposite of a good virtue. Why does this get upvoted? Hacker News in a truly despicable state these days when this is what bubbles to the top. It saddens me to see that all the good people here have left or stopped participating. When we hear how rotten social media is, this also includes HN.
I don't think he is hired for coding, he is hired for the product. It is not that he is going to join a product team and code, he probably will lead and influence the product, where other software engineers can help to fulfill.
If all the above is true, why didn't Sam & Co just replicate his product and offer their own improved version - - with security incorporated within ?
As I understand Peter had already early retired because of a successful startup exit and presumably has more money than he knows what to do with. Does that help make you feel less jealous on him getting a job at oai?
Maybe think of this as a hiring of a marketer and tech influencer. And someone with the chops to create a viral product.
Exactly.
If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.
It's the old story: evil, irresponsible behaviour has a higher chance of success, than being good and responsible. AIs recent history is a good example. Google had the lead, but lost it (temporary) to OpenAI, because Google was responsible and were not willing to open pandoras box. Apple seems to have something similar to OpenClaw for a while now, but withholds from releasing it, because it's too unsecure. History is full of people burning the world for their own greed, and getting rewarded for it; and they then call it "taking risks" and "thinking outside the box"... I think the underlying reason might be in too many people thinking there is some level of competence behind the irresponsible behaviour and it's alls just controlled harm or something like that.
Whenever technically more capable folks diss the growth of a non technical person into bigger roles, I'm obligated to post this Steve Jobs video being asked about Java.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6
Errr its always been extremely true that social networking brings success. With far more value return than writing great code nobody knows about or uses.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success"
Kids and young people have known this forever at this point. Sadly.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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...
Exactly. This whole thing just seems like a repeat of Flappy Bird to me. What was the "lesson" of Flappy Bird for game developers? That you should make very small, very simple games? How has that worked out for the vast majority of copycats who tried? The truth is there isn't any lesson, other than "sometimes people play the lottery, get lucky and win". Most people who play won't, though.
I wouldn't necessarily expect him to be hired as their lead developer, but I think he would be a good product manager. He's clearly created something people want and see potential for.
> We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought.
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.
As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AKKmqGvE
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.
dont be jealous. working for some evil corporate is soulsucking for most humans. Only few thrive in such environments. most will try to get quick $$ and exit before they feel completely dead inside.
No need to be jealous. If you'd have watched some of the interviews of this guy then you'd know that he's not vibe coding.
> We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person.
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.
Do good or at least useful work in public and you'd be surprised at what can happen.
not sure why i find a lot of these types of comments lately, just a sign of the times i guess? criticism sure, but to reduce all of his work as if it were a paragraph prompt or something, that's something else.
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.
It’s not the code. It’s the vision and the can-do attitude. And perhaps a bit of the (earned) name.
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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?
This is such a strange take to be the top comment of “hacker” news. Why are we shaming someone who “hacked” something together and made it open source?
I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".
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?
> Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed?
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.
Maybe it still is supposed to sound fancy to say you didn't read any of the code. The guy definitely could very deeply understand, read and edit the code, he developed the industrial standard liberal for PDF editing (used by Dropbox etc).
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.
The lesson here is to make something people want. All else is forgiven is the product is something people really want - the product market fit most of us never achieve.
That wasn‘t true before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801
It's also from a guy who rebranded three times (Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw) in a row and this is technically his fourth rebrand.
Props for admitting jealousy and for being honest! I often feel the same way when fixing bugs in others code.
it's a tough pill to swallow for developers, but nobody cares about your ability to write code. people care about you shipping something people want.
i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen
That's such a bizarre thing to claim when offshoring software development has historically been a huge failure. You've always needed competent technical staff with even more demanding management requirements to stand a chance.
What percentage of programming job interviews every went like that? They ask fizz buzz, they ask DP, they system analysis and design, and some culture fit. Maybe some people might ask this B-school type stuff but who is out there verifying deliverables of people from previous jobs?
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One day Atlas may shrug, but not today, atlast..
What sense it made to do something like Instagram? There were already N social networks where you could share photos. No technical excellence was needed. It was just momentum, being in the right incubator, and so forth... I understand what you are saying, but it has been always like that.
Well - no. There are some products where the product itself was relatively simple to build, and the rest was product-market fit. Those are the easy ones technically, but that's not the only type of successful product. YouTube wouldn't be working today if it broke all the time under load.
HN Really hates understanding business. All these comments, yet no one has gotten the answer right.
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.
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Good move. OpenClaw is alpha quality, very dangerous, super useful and super fun - which amplifies the danger. It’s a disaster waiting to happen and a massive risk for a solo dev to take on. So best to trade it for a killer job offer and transfer all that risk.
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.
He's not really trading anything though. He was hired by OpenAI. OpenClaw will remain free and open source (it's the first line of his blog post). He says that OpenAI will allow him to work on it and already sponsors it so maybe that means he'll have time to improve it, I guess.
Given he's moving to SF to work in their office I presume part of it is he'll be working in-house on their commercial replacement, and will continue to cover costs on the OSS version which he's free to work on. His recent posts make it clear they've got plans for their own stuff to replace it.
Lex's interview https://youtu.be/YFjfBk8HI5o.
It really is quite funny though isn't it. Yes, it's a fucking hand grenade that will blow up at any moment. It's perfect for a one man band startup. Because there's massive upside and at the end of the day if it blows up he's just back to sqaure one, what did you expect from a 1 man band.
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.
OpenClaw is more like an art project than a consumer product. It has shown clear consumer product demand. The next step is making it a safer consumer product.
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You definitely have a point there.
> Listen to... Lex
People can do that? I always assumed Lex was a CIA psyop to experiment with the ability to make people sleep on demand.
While that might take it a little too far, Lex surely is a dangerous individual. On various occasions did he sympathize with the war and terror that Russia is doing in Ukraine. I do not click on any of his content because I will not support these (and a few other questionable, to say the least) views of his. Also his image of an MIT researcher is hilarious.
Well that was a crazy month. Kudos to this guy for recognising his goals which is not to start another company. It is very easy to get intoxicated by the idea of something being so successful that you can capture the value, especially after having struggled for so long with a previous company. I think it's every founder's dream to like just hit lightning. But this stuff is incredibly stressful and it's important to be able to look into the future and ask yourself. Is this what I want? Is this what I need in my life? And the answer here is no. This person can deliver value elsewhere quite easily and get the reward without as much stress. We should all take a lesson from this whirlwind journey. Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it. A lot of people feel a little bit of envy or jealousy. I used to feel that when I was working on something and I saw other people succeed and I wished that that had happened to me. But if it was meant for you it would find you. And the fact that it hasn't found you means that it was not meant for you. We all have our role to play. There is something important for us to do and that's not necessarily something that is world famous or amasses thousands of GitHub stars. If after reading this it's still bothering you. Take a walk and reflect on the good things in your life.
> Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it.
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.
This feels like such a defeatist take. The ideas time had come. For luck to strike you have to be in the market for it. Just keep shipping and playing. We don’t “all have our role to play” but there are a lot of roles that need playing
But that's the point it's not defeatist. It's more about saying there is something for you to do. There is a role for you to play but that's not necessarily the role that you see somebody else playing. So sometimes we see somebody else doing something and we think whoa that person is successful and we become envious of that and then we want to emulate that. But we forget that maybe that's not what's intended for us. Maybe that person is really good at that thing or that's what was for them. But for us we might be good at something else and there might be something that we are uniquely positioned to do so. The point is not to be defeatist but not to focus on what somebody else has right. Focus on what you have and focus on what your ability is and focus on what's going to improve your quality of life and the people around you and don't focus on the negative aspects of what is effectively fomo
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This is the same "heating" effect as social media algorithms apply to random podcasters (e.g. Joe Rogan) - those isolated cases of success which happen to be completely synthetic provide an 'american dream' for the system, whose success depends on the Fantasy being alive and believed in by those who are its customers/product
I like the parallel as Joe Rogan is a trained actor who mastered the art of incorporating all the success factors of its predecessors. He saw obscure podcasts gaining intense viewership, he literally mimicked the patterns and merged it into the "best" of all. Even made his more mainstream, while fooling millions to feel they are part of a niche enlighten resistance community.
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.
With OpenClaw we are seeing how the app layer becomes as important as the model layer.
You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
> You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.
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.
Memory. I have built up so many scripts and crons and integrated little programs and memories with open claw it would be difficult to migrate to some other system.
System of record and all.
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Indeed, coding agents took off because of a lot of ongoing trial and error on how to build the harness as much as model quality.
This is the sort of thing employers are failing on. They sign contracts that assume employees are going to be logging in and asking questions directly.
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 2 months and there are already a rush of viable alternatives, from smaller, lightweight versions, to hosted, managed SaaS alternatives.
I’d suspect the moat here will be just as fragile as every other layer
openclaw is just one of many now, there are new ones weekly.
And OpenClaw is nothing revolutionary. It’s all shit we could do before OpenClaw. It’s just that no one was stupid enough to do it. Now everyone has gone crazy.
AI is the new Javascript?
Plus you can get the model to write you a bespoke one that suits your needs.
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Why?
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.
This has been the case since the beginning of last year imo
There’s actually many UI’s now? See moltis, rowboat, and various others that are popping up daily
I think the point was about the frequency of switching your frontend. With a proper frontend you can switch the backend on each request if you want, but usually people will stay with one main-interface of their choice. For AI, OpenClaw, Moltic, Rowboat are now such a frontend, but not many will use them all at once.
It's similar to how people usually only use one preferred browser, editor, shell, OS.
Are there any with a credible approach to security, privacy and prompt injections?
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Seems like models become commoditized?
Same for OpenClaw, it will be commodity soon if you don't think it is already
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It has already been so with ppq.ai (pay per query dot AI)
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Things that arn't happening any time soon but need to for actual product success built on top:
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.
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? We saw this years/months ago with Claude Code and Cursor.
But it just codes. And are console / ide tools.
Openclaw is so so so much more.
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What’s the moat exactly?
None. That's why joining openai is the perfect fit.
Well, duh.
You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.
If you step back and look at this whole thing from a marketing and cash flow perspective, I think it makes a lot more sense.
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.
Very good business observation.
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.
This is all about PR now.
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.
So with Max Stoiber and Peter Steinberger 2 well known Austrian Devs ended up at OpenAI.
Congrats to Peter!
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?
It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps.
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.
AI companies must hate this right? Because they're selling tokens at a loss?
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As an experiment, I set it up with a z.ai $3/month subscription and told it to do a tedious technical task. I said to stay busy and that I expect no more than 30 minutes of inactivity, ever.
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.
So, you don't know if it has produced anything valuable yet?
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$3 z.ai subscription? Sounds like it already burned $3k
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.
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Keep us posted, this sounds great!
Not being tied to Anthropic’s models and ecosystems, having more control over the agent, interacting with it from you messaging app of choice.
There's some neat experiments people post on social media. Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is its sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
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.
> Mostly, the thing that captures the imagination the most is it’s sort of like watching a silicon child grow up.
> 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.
Imagine putting it in a robot with arms and legs, and letting it loose in your house, or your neighborhood. Oh, the possibilities!
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Weird how OpenAI would spend so much money to buy a developer when developers will just be obsolete in a couple years.
Great products sell methodology, not just code. Great developers produce methodology. So what OpenAI bought isn't a developer, but a meta-methodology owner. It's a bet on Peter's mind to produce leading methodology for agent applications.
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.
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).
The game theory here is that either OpenAI acquires this thing now, or someone else will. It doesn't matter whether they could replicate it. All of the major players can and probably will replicate OpenClaw in their own way and make their thing incredibly scalable and wonderful. But OpenClaw has a gigantic following and it's relevant in this moment. For a trivial amount of money (relatively speaking), OpenAI gets to own this hype and direct it toward their models and their apps. Had they not succeeded here, Anthropic or Google would have gladly directed the hype in their direction instead, and OpenAI would be licking its wounds for some time trying to create something equivalently shiny.
It was a very good play by OpenAI.
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> Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering
Have you tried using it?
It was more of a reference to the YC partner who suggested a one-man unicorn was on the horizon due to AI.
I think that’s fair.. building a competing product would likely be relatively easy and inexpensive. But that’s true for most software now: it’s becoming easier to build, and the barriers to entry are lower.
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.
Is it really that amazing? It’s a pretty simple idea, and seemed pretty buggy when I tried it out.
novel software engineering ? Did you look at the code ?
then explain why google paid 33 billion for a 5 year old israeli cybersecurity startup
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Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
what is the memory architecture, doesn't this already exist in claude code?
Where do you guys get the 1b exit from? I didn't see numbers yet.
It's AI. Take a sane number, add a 14,000x multiplier to that. And you'll only be one order of magnitude off in our current climate.
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No because this was not a billion dollar business
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
Reminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment.
Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
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“Just” is doing some heavy lifting here.
It's kind of crazy that this kind of thing can cause so much hype. It is even useful? I just really don't see any utility in being able to access an LLM via Telegram or whatever.
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Wasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
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Yeah, shows he is smart, in the current market state.
How do you know it was for less than a billion?
The sentence ended with a question mark.
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We're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it.
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
how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
I keep reading takes about OpenClaw being acquired, but even the TLDR at the top makes it clear that OpenClaw isn’t part of this move:
> 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.
I literally had begun to wonder if OpenClaw had more of a future as a company than OpenAI
This is a smart play. Models aren't going to be a moat, performance is too easy to replicate and all the big players (and even OSS) are following quickly behind. The only moat that will be stable is having something with network effects and adoption overhead, something that can grab eyes and has sticking power. This was probably the idea behind Sora (although it hasn't worked).
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.
I really hope Mario who wrote the engine that powers OpenClaw[0] gets spoils as well.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono
peter's claw is a lot more than just a wrapper around my slop.
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 :)
Your Pi is a piece of art. Thank you for building it. I spend almost 16 hrs a day with it . And there is not a single day I am not awestruck. Big fan!
Best HN comment ever.
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pi is the most amazing piece of software I have interacted with, thanks for building it
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> Special thanks to Mario Zechner for his support and for pi-mono. Special thanks to Adam Doppelt for lobster.bot.
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#comm...
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Other than the response from Mario itself, pi is very frequently showcased at meetups organised by Peter/OpenClaw community, so there is definitely crediting involved.
Mario has a special place in the Clawtributor list.
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw#community
Reminds me of people talking about Angry Birds and the Box2d physics engine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2273694
There are a few take aways I think the detractors and celebrators here are missing.
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
I think this comment misses that OpenAI hired the guy, not the project.
"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.
“”” Like it or not, so-called vibe coding is the new norm for productive software development”””
Alright
Not only that, his output is insane, he has more active projects than I bother to count and more than 70k commits last year. He's probably one of, if not the best, vibe coding evangelist.
https://github.com/steipete
It also probably didn't hurt that he favors Codex over Claude.
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So creating unsafe software is the new norm?
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This comment is filled with speculation which I think is mostly unfounded and unnecessarily negative in its orientation.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560
Other words removed:
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So because Peter said the next version is going to be safe means it'll be safe? I prefer to judge people by their actions more than their words. The fact that OpenClaw is not just unsafe but, as you put it, infamously so, only begs the question "why wasn't it built safely the first time?"
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
> This buy out for something vibe coded
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 the blog says @steipete sold his SOUL.md for Sam Altman’s deal and let down the community.
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.
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I don't mean to be cynical, but I read this move as: OpenAI scared, no way to make money with similar product, so acqui-hire the creator to keep him busy.
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.
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Fair enough. Call it a high profile acquihire then
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I think both this comment and OP's confuse this.
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:
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This is to avoid open claw liability and because hiring people (often with a license to their tech or patents) is the new smarter way to acquire and avoid antitrust issues
"build a hugely popular tool"
Define hugely popular relative to the scale of users of OAI... personally this thread is the first time Ive heard of openclaw.
To give you an idea of the scale, OpenClaw is probably one of the biggest developments in open source AI tools in the last couple of months. And given the pace of AI, that's a big deal.
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Last week it was renamed from "Clawd" and this week the creator is abandoning it. Everything is moving fast.
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190k stars on github
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The tech industry is broad, and if you are using OpenAI in a consumer and personal manner you weren't the primary persona amongst whom the conversation around OpenClaw occurred.
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.
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you living under a rock
I think they want the man and ideas behind the most useful AI tool thus far. Surprisingly, and OpenAI may see this - it is a developer tool.
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.
I am not a fan of OpenAI but they are not exactly hiring a security researcher. They are hiring an aspiring builder who has built something the masses love. They can always provide him the structure and support he needs to make his products secure. It's not mutually exclusive (safety vs hiring him).
What is interesting about OpenClaw is it's architecture. It is like an ambient intelligence layer. Other approaches up until now have been VSCode or Chromium based integrations into the PC layer.
There’s plenty of straightforward reasons why OpenAI would want to do this, it doesn’t need to be some sort of malicious conspiracy.
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.
I suspect Anthropic was seeing a huge spike of concurrent model usage at a too fast of a rate that claude code just doesn't do, CC is rather "slow" at api calls per minute. Also lots and lots of cache, the sheer amount of cache that claude does is insane.
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> 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.
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.
This is basically acquihire. Peter seems really a genius and they better poach him before Anthropic do.
Is he? My impression of Clawdbot was it was a good idea but not particularly technically impressive or even well-written. I had all kinds of issues setting it up.
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> 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.
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.
He's also a great booster of Codex. Says he greatly prefers it to Claude. So his role might turn out to be evanglism.
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Thats all it is really. It is to say "See! Look what a handful of people armed with our tools can do".
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.
Most of these are good callouts, but I think it is best for us to look at the evolution of the AI segment in the same manner as "Cloud" developed into a segment in the 2000s and 2010s.
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).
> 2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move.
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.
The amount of negative posts about this on twitter is crazy, I've not seen any positive posts. Jealousy or something else?
Twitter is negative in general, but generally when a project like this gets bought it marks the end of the project. The acquirer always says something about how they don't plan to change anything, but it rarely works that way.
My negativity is for two reasons:
(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.
Twitter is not a place for positive posts.
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Just my opinion, but I no longer trust sentiment on X now that Elon is in control.
I am fine with the founder joining OpenAI, he gets to get paid regardless.
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.
It's mostly congratulatory from what I'm seeing?
https://xcancel.com/steipete/status/2023154018714100102
Anyone who likes Openclaw will be upset that it’s getting acquired and inevitably destroyed. Anyone who dislikes it will be annoyed that the creator is getting so rewarded for building junk. The only people who would like this are OpenAI fans, if there even are any.
I think people are sad that OpenClaw is now part of Big Ai.
After two weeks of viral posts, articles, and Mac Mini buying sprees, as it's been happening up to now for every AI product that was not an LLM, it kinda disappeared from the consciousness-- as well as from the tooling, probably--of people.
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.
100% jealousy, similar to how anyone who posts a negative reaction to a crypto rugpull scam is just jealous that they didn't get to pull the scam themselves.
In this case I think it is largely jealousy, it's just a guy getting a new job at the end of the day.
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.
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Obviously, all the people that disagree with your framing and see AI as the largest possible boost to mankind, giving us more assistance than ever.
From their standpoint, it's all the negativity that seems crazy. If you were against that, you'd have to have something wrong with you, in their view.
Hopefully most people can see both sides, though. And realize that in the end, probably the benefits will be slow but steady (no "singularity"), and also the dangers will develop slowly yet be manageable (no Skynet or economic collapse).
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Imo Openclaw type AI has the most potential to benefit humans (automating drudgery while I own my data as opposed to creating gross simalcrums of human creativity). I suppose it's bad for human personal assistants, but I wouldn't pay for one of those regardless.
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That’s quite a lot of hyperbole.
It ain't extinct shit if it can't even drive the car to have it washed.
The generous interpretation is that Open AI is still safety aligned and they hired this guy because it's safer to have him inside and explain to him how reckless he's being, than having him far from "sphere of control".
The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.
> the amazing ability to move fast and break things.
Or just plain recklessness.
It’s not like Anthropic or OpenAI were not working on “AI assistants” before OpenClaw, it’s pretty much the endgame as I can see it. This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else. Although that’s impressive, I don’t see more than an acquisition of the hype by OpenAI.
My gut feeling is that OpenAI is desperately searching for The Killer App™ for LLMs and hired Peter to help guide them there.
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.)
In the AI space there isn’t a single killer app. EVERYTHING is open for disruption. ChatGPT was the start but OpenAI could create tons of other apps. They don’t need to wait for others to do so. People already want them to make a Slack replacement but I’m just wondering why none of the frontier labs are making a simple app platform that could be used to make custom apps like ChatGPT itself, or the Slack clone. Instead, they expect us to brute force app development through the API interface. Each frontier lab really needs their own Replit.
Like, why doesn’t OpenAI build tax filing into ChatGPT? That’s like the immediate use case for LLM-based app development.
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Orion is Kagis browser.
Atlas is OpenAIs browser
> the Sora "TikTok but AI" app
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.
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Regardless of what you think of OpenClaw, Peter is a great hire - he's been at the forefront of brute-forcing app development with coding agents.
Same here, seems 100% marketing move. The trend continues.
While insecure and not something I would use myself (yet) one thing OpenClaw has managed to do is to show people the potential that AI still has.
OpenAI has been running around headless for at least two years now. I've build systems like openclaw, based on email, at my day job and told OAI during an interview that they needed to build this or get smoked when someone else does. I guess aqi-hire is easier than building a team that can develop software internally.
Of course the S in openclaw is for security.
> This guy just single handedly released something useful (and very insecure) before anyone else.
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.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.
Single-handed made me smirk. It was vibe coded.
But... how is it even useful? Do you use it? Is it a good idea for anyone to, uh, use it? Is it a product that you or any other "vibe coder" cannot ~~build~~ tell Claude Code to build on the go, if he wants to communicate with Claude Code via WhatsApp for some reason? Sure, product doesn't need to be some sophisticated technology to be worth something, it could also just have user base because it succeeded at marketing, but does this particular product even benefit from network effects? What is this shit? Why anybody cares?
Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.
> all the world has gone crazy
Reminds me of 30 years ago.
While following OpenClaw, I noticed an unexpected resentment in myself. After some introspection, I realized it’s tied to seeing a project achieve huge success while ignoring security norms many of us struggled to learn the hard way. On one level, it’s selfish discomfort at the feeling of being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”). On another level, it feels genuinely sad that the culture of enforcing security norms - work that has no direct personal reward and that end users will never consciously appreciate, but that only builders can uphold - seems to be on it’s way out
But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw. Releasing vulnerable software that users run on their own machines isn't going to compromise OpenClaw itself. It can still deliver value for it's users while also requiring those same users to handle the insecurity of the software themselves (by either ignoring it or setting up sandboxes, etc to reduce the risk, and then maybe that reduced risk is weighed against the novelty and value of the software that then makes it worth it to the user to setup).
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.
This argument has the same obvious flaws as the anti-mask/anti-vax movement (which unfortunately means there will always be a fringe that don't care). These things are allowed to interact with the outside world, it's not as simple as "users can blow their own system up, it's their responsibility".
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?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
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You should join the tobacco lobby! Genius!
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Exactly! I was digging into Openclaw codebase for the last 2 weeks and the core ideas are very inspiring.
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.
1: https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
> But the security risk wasnt taken by OpenClaw
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 am guessing there will be an OpenClaw "competitor" targeting Enterprise within the next 1-2 months. If OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini are fast and smart about it they could grab some serious ground.
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.
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Love passing off the externalities of security to the user, and then the second order externalities of an LLM that then blackmails people in the wild. Love how we just don’t care anymore.
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I don't agree that making your users run the binaries means security isn't your concern. Perhaps it doesn't have to be quite as buttoned down as a commercial product, but you can't release something broken by design and wash your hands of the consequences. Within a few months, someone is going to deploy a large-scale exploit which absolutely ruins OpenClaw users, and the author's new OpenAI job will probably allow him to evade any real accountability for it.
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> being left behind (“I still can’t bring myself to vibe code. I have to at least skim every diff. Meanwhile this guy is joining OpenAI”).
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?
Every single new tech industry thing has to learn security from scratch. It's always been that way. A significant number of people in tech just don't believe that there's anything to learn from history.
And the industry actively pushes graybeards away who have already been there done that.
For my entire career in tech (~20 years) I have been technically good but bad at identifying business trends. I left Shopify right before their stock 4xed during COVID because their technology was stagnating and the culture was toxic. The market didn't care about any of that, I could have hung around and been a millionaire. I've been at 3 early stage startups and the difference between winners and losers was nothing to do with quality or security.
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.
I think you’re being unduly harsh on yourself. At least by the Shopify/COVID example. COVID was a black swan event, which may very well have completely changed the fortunes of companies like Shopify when online commerce surged and became vital to the economy. Shortcomings, mismanagement and bad culture can be completely papered over by growth and revenue.
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.
> seems to be on it’s way out
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 think your self reflection here is commendable. i agree on both counts.
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
building this openclaw thing that competes with openai using codex is against the openai terms of service, which say you can't use it to make stuff that competes with them. but they compete with everyone. by giving zero fucks (or just not reading the fine print), bro was rewarded by the dumb rule people for breaking the dumb rules. this happens over and over. there is a lesson here
underrated comment
and this is why they bought Peter. i’m betting he will come to regret it.
I don't know. It's more of a sharp tool like a web browser (also called a "user agent") - yes an inexperienced user can quickly get themselves into trouble without realizing it (in a browser or openclaw), yes the agent means it might even happen without you being there.
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"?
But in this case following security norms would be a mistake. The right thing to take away is that you shouldn't dogmatically follow norms. Sometimes it's better to just build things if there is very little risk
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)
> 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 :)
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So my unsubstantiated conspiracy theory regarding Clawd/Molt/OpenClaw is that the hype was bought, probably by OpenAI. I find it too convenient that not long after the phrase “the AI bubble“ starts coming into common speech we see the emergence of a “viral” use case that all of the paid influencers on the Internet seem to converge on at the same time. At the end of the day piping AI output with tool access into a while loop is not revolutionary. The people who had been experimenting with these type of set ups back when LangChain was the hotness didn’t organically go viral because most people knew that giving a language model unrestricted access to your online presence or bank account is extremely reckless. The “I gave OpenClaw $100 and now I bought my second Lambo. Buy my ebook” stories don’t seem credible.
So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.
The modern influencer landscape was such a boon for corporations.
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.
Your introspection missed the obvious point that you just wish you were him. Your resentment had nothing to do with security. It's a self-revelation that you don't actually care about it either and you resent wasting your time.
At the end of the day, he built something people want. That’s what really matters. OpenAI and Anthropic could not build it because of the security issues you point out. But people are using it and there is a need for it. Good on him for recognizing this and giving people what they want. We’re all adults and the users will be responsible for whatever issues they run into because of the lack of security around this project.
Admittedly, I might not be the.. targeted demographic here, but I can't say I understand what problem it solves, but even cursory read immediately flags all the way in which it can go wrong ( including recent 'rent a human hn post'). I am fascinated, and I wonder if that it is partially that fascination that drives current wave of adoption.
I will say openly: I don't get it and I used to argue for crypto use cases.
Well OpenClaw has ~3k open PRs (many touching security) on GitHub right now. Peter's move shows killer product UI/UX, ease of use and user growth trump everything. Now OpenAI with throw their full engineering firepower to squash those flaws in no time.
Making users happy > perfect security day one
"Peter's move shows killer product UI/UX, ease of use and user growth trump everything. "
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.
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Security always is the most time consuming in a backend project
This is a normal reaction to unfairness. You see someone who you believe is Doing It Wrong (and I’d agree), and they’re rewarded for it. Meanwhile you Do It Right and your reward isn’t nearly as much. It’s natural to find this upsetting.
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.
Hey, as a security engineer in AI, I get where you're coming from.
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.
Security is always a cost center. We've seen multiple iterations of changes already impact security in the same ways over the last 20+ years. Nothing is different here and the outcomes will be the same: just good enough but always a step behind. The one thing that is a new lever to pull here is time, people need far less of it to make disastrous mistakes. But, ultimately, the game hasn't changed and security budgets will continue to be funneled to off the shelf products that barely work and the remainder of that budget will continue to go to the overworked and underpaid. Nothing really changes.
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I think you should give your gut instinct more credit. The tech world has gotten a false sense of security from the big SaaS platforms running everything that make the nitty gritty security details disappear in a seamless user experience, and that includes LLM chatbot providers. Even open source development libraries with exposure to the wild are so heavily scrutinized and well-honed that it’s easy even for people like me that started in the 90s to lose sight of the real risk on the other side that. No more popping up some raw script on an Apache server to do its best against whatever is out there. Vibe coded projects trade a lot of that hard-won stability for the convenience of not having to consider some amount of the implementation details. People that are jumping all over this for anything except sandbox usage either don’t know any better, or forgot what they’ve learned.
Totally agree. And the fact that the author says
> 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.
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I've been feeling this SO much lately, in many ways. In addition to security, just the feeling of spending decades learning to write clean code, valuing having a deep understanding of my codebase and tooling, thorough testing, maintainability, etc, etc. Now the industry is basically telling me "all that expertise is pointless, you should give it up, all that we care about it is a future of endless AI slop that nobody understands".
I've been feeling a similar kind of resentment often. My whole life I have prided myself on being the guy that actually bothers to read the docs and understand how shit works. Seems like the whole industry is basically saying none of that matters, no need to understand anything deeply anymore. Feels bad man.
AI slop will collapse under its own weight without oversight. I really think we will need new frameworks to support AI-generated code. Engineers with high standards will be needed to build and maintain the tools and technologies so that AI-written code can thrive. It's not game over just yet
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This is NOT OpenAI buying OpenClaw, it's OpenAI hiring someone who can build it, similar to them betting on Jony Ive.
This is basically what's happening: https://youtu.be/N-Esh4W3dfI
OpenAI did not "bet" on Jony Ive. They bought his company io Products.
Is that not a bet?
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It's strange how quickly this project got so big... It did not seem like anything particularly novel to me.
I think it was obvious, yet nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use.
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.
> nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use
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.
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good summary. i think you forgot heartbeat.md which powers some autonomy.
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
Aren't all of these things you can do with Claude Code? Granted, the chat app one is novel, but you could ask Claude Code to set that up.
Most things that go viral actually have a concerted marketing push behind them. I suspect that was the case here. Something about the way people talked about it didn't come across as very genuine.
As someone who attended numerous meetups from the author and saw the vibe among those events, believe me it was as genuine as it can get.
It's another game where software quality, security of novelty is not an outcome-defining factor.
I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.
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.
AMEX, Capital One and Apple are not even close to the top of the list of companies that I would trust with my digital data.
Never mind the list of companies - I'd be very curious to know what the 'trust signals' are that would help you trust a company?
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Jacques, do you mind sharing your list of trusted companies? Thanks in advance.
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I’d be very curious what your list would be
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Quick plus one for Capital One after also working there. They're by far the most tech-forward of all the larger financial institutions, and by virtue of being a FI they take data-security much more seriously than any other "tech" companies.
No this is not a paid post lol
> 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 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.
Prepare for the rug pull...
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Privacy aside, you can never trust an LLM with your data and trust it to do exactly what it was instructed to do.
You raised a good point I am now personally basically expecting to see this year ( next at the latest ). Some brave corporate will decide for millions of users to, uhh, liberate all users data. My money is not of that happening at Googles or OpenAIs of the world though. I am predicting it will be either be a bank or one of the data brokers.
With any luck, maybe this will finally be a bridge too fast, like what Amazon's superbowl ad did for surveillance conversation.
Sorry to pile on, but Capital One is an insane name to drop there.
You really trust them?
My trust does not extend that far.
Sorry to break it to you but I would not trust any financial companies with my personal data. Simply because I’ve seen how they use data to build exploitive products in the past.
Well it’s not even just data, you have to trust actions taken if you want the assist to, you know, assist. I have been yoloing it and really enjoying it. Albeit from a locked off server.
>Apple
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?
is this marketing or is just relating what they did to keep things secure?
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
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sorry to say it, but C1 LOL. they don’t care at all about privacy! Don’t mistake your team for the company values.
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So that’s OpenClaw dead then.
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 was already dead. 500k lines of slop, good luck building a tower on mud.
Kinda… funny? that one in this position could not just blurt out “they offered the most”?
Truly incredible.
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.
Title could have mentioned this relates to Openclaw/moltbot/clawdbot too. Now the post became more relevant to read when I realized what this was about.
It indeed is the logical next step. It's been super interesting following him online and he's inspired a bunch of people to just go build stuff. Because why not.
I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.
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.
so open claw will be neither open nor claw
Can someone explain what value openclaw provides over like claude code? It seems like it's literally just a repackaged claude code (i.e. a for loop around claude) with a model selector (and I guess a few builtin 'tools' for web browsing?)
The main one is that you can run and/or host it remotely, unlike Claude Desktop. By this I mean, you can run OpenClaw on a service like Tailscale and protect your actual machine from certain security/privacy concerns and - regardless of the choice - you can connect your access to OpenClaw via any chat agent or SSH tunnel, so you can access it from a phone. If Claude Cowork comes to iOS/Android with a tunnel option, they can resolve this difference.
A smaller difference would be that you can use any/all models with OpenClaw.
Hmm, whats stopping you from running claude code on a separate machine you can ssh into? I don't understand that point at all, I do that all the time.
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.
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OpenClaw is probably overkill if you just want to have a nice remote UI to access claude code, do tool call approvals. There are a ton of remote cli apps and guides to setup ssh access via tailscale etc, but none that just work with a nice remote web interface.
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)
https://github.com/kzahel/yepanywhere
From what I remember, the key differentiating features were:
- 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
Its a coding agent in a loop (infinite loops are rejected by coding agents usually) with access to your computer, some memory, and can communicate through telegram. That’s it. It’s brilliant though and he was the first to put it out there.
I see, so there's actually an additional for loop here, which is `sleep(n); check_all_conversations()`, that is not something claude code does for sure.
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.
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For programmers or people who know computers quite well the difference to claude code is small i would say. But for "Normies" its magical that you can just ask your computer to do anything from anywhere (set timers, install stable diffusion, send you a specific doc in your download folder). You don't even have to write it, you can send it a voice message and it will install whisper or send it to the openai whisper api, etc. Obviously this is more then dangerous, but looking at what passwords people still choose today (probably also the reason why everything requires MFA nowadays), most people don't care about Security.
for me it's that it works remotely and my kids can access it over Discord
They serve different purposes. OpenClaw is supposed to be more of an autonomous sidekick assistant thing that can take instructions over different messenger channels. It can also be set up to take ongoing instructions and just churn on general directions.
It‘s just crazy to me that this guy lives around the corner. That should inspire some hope for me I guess, that even people from Vienna can be successful on such a level.
If you actually spent some time researching his background you would know he was already very successful before his vibe-coding saga.
Is an agent running on a desktop, with access to excel, word, email and slack going to replace Saas?
Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes
This could be the most disruptive software we have seen
If it replaces SaaS it will replace you too; how else will you collaborate?
What I want to know: Is the OpenClaw = Open Source aspect secure?
If your SaaS is a CRUD with a shitty UI in React then yes
If the ai model gets better, more and more Saas can be replaced with an agent with an excel sheet
To be fair if you are not going interface with your SaaS via GUI it can be one big API for all I care. I’ll just chat and automate to it anyway.
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The guy already sold his previous company for a shitload of money. Got bored and did a side project that stirred the Internet on the past month. That is way more than most people here are going to accomplish in a lifetime. Yet, he has some deal with OpenAI to work on whatever he things exciting. I don't see why so much negative comments here other than jelously
True but between the lines I read some interesting points here. Great it get the gold nugget but I found it curious how he dunked on the JVM after all the clones emerges with much more perfs and much less code/energy consumpution.
Do you have a link to any of the JVM clones? Perplexity and Google came up empty.
For further context, he has like 60 projects for general use during this “got bored” phase
Its just happened that this one latched on a trend well and went viral, cease and desist from its name accelerated the virality
I just dislike Sam Altman, and I think he's just using this as a marketing ploy, which is more dishonesty from him. People keep saying OpenClaw is hype. I installed it, but I never tried to run it, and I don't know what the compelling reason is to. Supposedly you can talk to your agent from your iMessage? Who cares? Why not just talk to Claude Code?
The big draw of open claw is the memory architecture. Because you effectively start from scratch every time you open a new claude chat. Open Claw on the other hand, it compacts regularly, but also generates daily digests, and uses vector search, and then uses thoughtful memory retrieval techniques to add relevant context to your queries. Recent things get weighted more heavily, but full text search of all chats is still possible, and this is all managed automatically. Plus it uses markdown so the barrier to entry for manually auditing/modifying memories etc is very very low. If you say "can you check if my solar panel for my power generator arrive yet?" it is going to probably know what I'm talking about and go check my email for delivery notifications, based on conversations I've had with it about buying, ordering the solar panel etc. Claude is just going to ask clarifying questions since it has no idea what I am referencing.
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I also not a Sam's fan for the same reason. But if he offered me a big check to work whatever project I wanted, I would not care about it being a "marketing ploy".
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
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Just look all the people at Trump's inauguration. The whole US economical elite is supporting it...
Personal agents disrupt OpenAI’s revenue plan. They had been planning to put ads in ChatGPT to make revenue. If users rapidly move to personal agents which are more resistant to ads, running on a blend of multiple models/compute providers - then they won’t be able to deliver their revenue promises.
Firstly, OpenAI has lacked focus so they're pursuing lots of different paths despite the obvious one (ads in chatgpt), like hiring Johnny Ive - a move that feels more WeWork than anything.
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.
> had been planning to put ads in ChatGPT
As per the new terms of service, the ads are already in
Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast... was not unlike listening to a PR automaton. Now going to work for OpenAI. Yup.
How can you avoid the guy doing PR?
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.
> Not sure if anyone has heard his interview on the Hard Fork podcast...
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
> "What I want is to change the world".
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.
These words may mean anything. From "get people extinct" to "make shit ton of money" for myself.
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.
Fine doublespeak there. It can mean anything when talking to the public, and anything else when talking to Sam Altman.
Austrian media are reporting that Peter Steinberger had a $100m exit with PSPDFKit in 2021.
I'm extremely curious what OpenAI's offer was. The utility of more money is diminished when you're already pretty wealthy.
It makes me more inclined to take the OP at face value, genuine interest in working on something similar and making it easier for everyone ('my mum') to use.
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.
I think he accepted that offer exactly for this reason . He feels he can have a bigger impact within OpenAI (and maybe become a billionaire in the medium run?) that creating his own business (again) out of OpenClaw.
> The claw is the law.
This isn't a Slay The Spire reference is it?
I think so
Unclear what this truly means for the open version.
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 OpenAI version will be locked down in a bad way. It'll be ecosystem tied and a lot of the "security" will be from losing control of the harness.
Not sure. It's also plausible that OpenAI wants access to everybody's email, slack, whatsapp, telegram, github source code, whatever else this thing gets hooked up to.
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.
Just like the original OpenAI story, this seems like a case of reputation hacking through asymmetry in risk tolerance.
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.
I think it's at the final stage of software pump and dump [1]. OpenAI is probably hiring more for the reputation/marketing, rather than for any technical skills behind OpenClaw.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776848
> Anybody could have thought of this or done it
To be fair, when used in retrospect, this applies to just about any big tech company
I like your analysis
Cool. Good for him. I've been building agentic and observational systems and have been working to make them safe and layered in defense. And, well, I probably should have just said "fuck it" and put a disclaimer sticker on the front to let it fly.
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.
I thought it was a an interesting focal point for agentic ideas, but now it is too much flavored towards OpenAI
It likely won't matter much in the end, but I do think this could be a significant mistake for OpenAI.
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.
This take is imo very contrarian. Is Anthropic really popping champagne? They kind of look like the bad guys in this entire saga. If not the bad guys the enemy of fun and open source builders.
"popping champagne" is a figure of speech (perhaps hyperbole, or an idiom) meant to express not the literal act of "really popping champagne", but instead reaping the benefits of a seemingly poorly calculated business move by the other guys.
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.
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Who are you referring to by "They" it's not clear to me.
Moving the project to a foundation is smart. Most AI tools die when the founder leaves. This one might actually survive.
I think peter was mostly using calude and to a lesser extent codex and claude was getting a free marketing. If he can just improve codex to work better with openclaw it will be a big win for openai. If he can make openai agent at par with openclaw with added safety/security it would be a big win too. Its a smart move by openai and i totally get it.
Peter was quite vocal on twitter about _only_ using Codex to develop OpenClaw, but Claude is what a majority of people were (are?) using to run the tool itself.
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
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. :)
> Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had.
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
He's been on a number of podcasts - lex recently, and is really emphatic about Codex as the breakthrough solution he relies on. I just looked and on the handful of podcasts there are about 2,000,000 views this past week and half or so.
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It's how Steve Yegge became a "father of agentic orchestration" or something - there is some Canonical Universe Building exercise somewhere on twitter that just looks, for the lack of a better word, not rigorous. But good for all these people, I guess, for riding the hype to glory.
you didn't see because you dont follow peter on twitter. he talked for months now how codex is a better coder.
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Got super inspired by this story and (sorry for the plug) decided to build comrade, a security-focused AI agent: https://github.com/LaurentiuGabriel/comrade. I might be biased, but in my tests it managed to complete coding tasks (creating web apps from scratch) with less tools, which means less tokens, lower costs than openclaw.
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.
Maybe one day there will be a book citing the weird influence of crusteans on the tech world of this era... crabs, lobsters, ... I'm holding on for the next crayfish!
After this there is an inevitable wave of carcinisation of the agents/AI-centric software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Kudos to the guy for building such an awesome project in a very short amount of time. Of course he had to take some shortcuts to deliver, but at the end of the day, OpenClaw remains one of the best open source AI assistant implementations.
When I hear people talking about how insecure OpenClaw is, I remember how insecure the internet was in the early days. Sometimes it's about doing the right thing badly and fix the bad things after.
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 *
Innocent people are going to get hurt. Not sure how yet, but, giving a company intimate details about your life never ends well.
at this point idk what openclaw does and am afraid to ask but great for him
Every time this is brought up I have to go read up on it again, assuming I just didn’t get it last time.
And every time I reach the same conclusion: it's a WhatsApp/Telegram/etc wrapper for LLMs.
Until next time!
All they have to do now is partner with one of the major messaging providers like telegram and they can offer this as a hosted bot solution and probably dominate the market. Yes people are going out there buying mac minis and enjoying setting it up themselves but 90% of the general public don't want to do or maintain that and still want the benefits of all of it.
Openclaw did what no major model producer would do. Release insanly insecure software that can do whatever it wants on your machine.
If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.
Major producers like OpenAI optimize for safety and brand reputation avoiding backlash. Open source projects optimize for raw capability and friction less experimentation. It is risky yes, but it allows for rapid innovation that strictly aligned models can't offer.
Is it? You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container. People were using CC outside of development scope for awhile.
> You basically got 95% of the way there with Claude Code inside of a container.
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.
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I am surprised at the amount of comments that dismiss coding as just means to an end. Yes, every skill at the end of the day is a means to an end, but mastery of those skills is at the end what drives the vision. To know where you are going you need to know where you have been.
That picture at the end of the post really explains and sums up the problem with AI bias...
I really hoped he would support Europe’s startup ecosystem. Hopefully, he will at least bring stronger privacy standards to OpenAI, such as a policy that prohibits reading or analyzing user prompts or AI responses.
I personally haven’t used open claw due to security concerns on my device.
How to mitigate this concern?
Don’t use it, or give it access to nothing important, therefore vastly limiting its potential. That’s the only way.
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.
OpenAI would have paid $400M or more for the latest AI hotness.
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.
Didn’t he make this in a month or two? That’s a great ROI
He's an experienced founder (psPdfKit)!
What crown jewels? Isn't openclaw, errr "open" source?
Elastic (Elasticsearch) – ~6.5 B USD
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)
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>effectively handing over the crown jewels
lol. what?
flappy bird effect
We’re in a hype state where someone can “generate” millions of dollars in value in a month by making a meme prototype that scratches the itch just right, despite having no real competitive moat, application, value proposition or even semblance of a path to one.
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.
It's pretty depressing yet motivating seeing SWE bifurcate.
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.
> 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.
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.
Every day the software world feels more and more like a casino.
Hugged to death?
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....
For anyone looking at alternatives in this space - I built Gobii (https://gobii.ai) 8 months before OpenClaw existed. MIT licensed, cloud native, gVisor sandboxed.
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.
Looks good! I'm curious, are customers fine with their data going to third-party LLM providers?
Not sure what gives you that idea. One of our superpowers is that we're MIT licensed and deployable to private clouds, or even fully airgapped with 196gb+ of vram to run minimax on vllm + Gobii.
I think this ship has sailed pretty hard, by now. Pretty much any app you can possibly use, from iTerm to Slack, is sending data to third-party LLMs (sometimes explicitly, most times as small features here and there)
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Incredibly depressing comments in this thread. He keeps OpenClaw open. He gets to work on what he finds most exciting and helps reach as many people as possible. Inspiring, what dreams are made of really. Top comments are about money and misguided racism.
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.
He said on Lex Fridman podcast that he has no intention of joining any company; that was a couple days ago.
It sounded to me like he's choosing between Meta and OpenAI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjfBk8HI5o&t=8976
where in the podcast (transcript: https://lexfridman.com/peter-steinberger-transcript/) did he say that?
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Ah but that was before he saw the comp packages. But no judgement. The tool is still open source. Seems like a great outcome for everyone.
He literally said the exact opposite.
Lex Friedman is a fraud/charlatan and shouldn’t be listened to.
Well, things change fast in the age of AI
He had to keep the grift going until the very last minute.
Frankly, I hope he maximized the amount of money he made. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And nobody knows where AI is headed or if OpenAI even will be in existence in a few years given their valuation and the amount of $ they need to burn to keep up.
> I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone.
Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"
> The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.
Bringing unblockable ads to the masses. Roger that.
OpenAI is speeding up the race to be the most evil company in the world. Impressing.
That's a brilliant move from OpenAI.
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!
Just <whatever>… to gain lots of traction.
Gaining traction is the tough part.
It's kind of a shame actually, because the whole promise of OpenClaw is that you own all the data yourself, you have complete control, you can write the memories or the personality of the bot. "Open"AI will never run ChatGPT this way. They want all of your data, your documents, your calendar, they want to keep it for themselves and lock you into their platform. They will want a sanitised corporate friendly version of an AI agent that reflects well on their brand.
I really hope Mario and Armin also gets poached
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.
What does "enterprise ready" mean in this context?
Expensive, bloated and safe for white collars to purchase.
Currently 2 big issues of openclaw is memory and security. Armin is working on sandboxing primitives which could help a lot.
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It means "ready for you to allow it to ruin your enterprise"
Congrats — just the beginning for agents!
Not surprising if you've been paying attention on Twitter, but interesting to see nonetheless.
So this is how you apply for a job in 2026...
This is how you can tell OpenAI is panicking, rather than build something fairly simple themselves, they insta bought it for the headline news/"hype"...
So if Openclaw is chromium then what will be chrome?
What exactly is the grand vision for this person. He uses soaring language to describe changing the world for his grandma or something. What is his vision and vision that all these smiling people in his pictures have of the world? Is it complete economic collapse? Is it the complete destruction of society due to AI? Is that really so exciting?
Wow, I really thought he would go with meta
I like the foundation ideas.
I think the goal for OpenAI employees today should be to do as much good as possible with the ridiculous amount of investor money raised before the bubble goes pop.
The question is whether OpenClaw will actually stay open in the world of 'Open'Ai.
I usually don't notice these things but in the picture in the bottom it's almost exclusively white men.
"AI" needs to be banned, datacenters destroyed and everyone who worked on this abominations shunned or jailed!
> 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.
You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.
Going to short OpenAI after hearing this.
You can't short OpenAI because it's a private company, also don't.
/s he is my friend
Those attempting to discredit the value of OpenClaw by virtue of it being easily replicable or simple are missing the point. This was, like most successful entrepreneurial endeavours, a distribution play.
The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.
im happy for him but it seems like a fairly simple app? why the need to poach?
the guy is Austrian... would prefer if the project evolved further but he used it as a trampoline to jump to OpenAi...
OpenAi is curating ChatGpt very well, which honestly I like, compared to other companies, maybe expect Anthropic, they are not "caring" that much
Dude builds an Anthropic-themed vibe-coded app (calls himself an "Anthropoholic"), it becomes insanely popular, and also happens to be completely insecure, Anthropic pressures him to change project's name twice, he does, and finally OpenAI acquires the inventor.
Good exit for him imo
I hope this results in an OpenAI client harness where the data is local.
So many people are so salty, it’s wild. That’s peak HN here
Isn't openai getting tanked because of its support of trump and ice?
Please exit your echo chamber
I was actually surprised to find a lot of people outside of my bubbles with this sentiment, from regular people from both of political spectrums to companies switching their llm provider (not us based)
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I appreciate the author’s work and he seems like a good guy.
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.
Disappointing TBH. I completely understand that the OpenAI offer was likely too good to pass up, and I would have done the same in his position, but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw. The position he is about to enter requires skills in politics and bureaucracy, not engineering and design.
> but I wager he is about to find out exactly why a company like OpenAI isn't able to execute and deliver like he single-handedly did with OpenClaw.
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
His mum don't need an AI agent. She needs her family to pull their heads of out their asses and support her.
Men definitely down voted this.
Congrats!
Good luck!
This is a jew who has a Github profile that's entirely AI slop
Who's this yahoo?
The creator of the original: https://www.nutrient.io/company/about/pspdfkit/
ok
good for you. make that money
Best way to democratize AI is to keep it as free or as inexpensive as possible.
Well, someone has to backfill Zoë Hitzig exiting.
Good thing Sam has no experience in transforming a foundation into for profit org ...
cant wait for this post to be memoryholed in 6 months when the community is a shell of its former self (no crustacean pun intended)
Are you saying it will be hollowed out?
congrats @steipete!
The tone of this blog post reads as incredibly snobby, self-congratulatory, main character syndrome.
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.
Salty. Celebrate people's success. It's good for your soul.
It’s hard to celebrate the success of people who convey toxic Silicon Valley stereotypes.
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.
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Time to uninstall
Peter is already a multimillionaire — he had an exit a few years ago for around $100 million. By his own account, he's spending $10,000+ per month on LLM tokens and other development costs. As long as OpenClaw stays open source and it remains possible to use all providers, this is totally fine by me.
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.
Damn. I just installed OpenClaw on my M2 Mac and hopped on a plane for our SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu. And Claw (that's the name of my new AI agent) kept me updated on my rebooking options and new terminal/gate assignments in SFO. All through the free WhatsApp access on United. AND, it refactored all my transferred Python code, built a graph of my emails, installed MariaDB and restored a backup from another PC. And, I almost forgot, fixed my 1337x web scrapping (don't ask) cron job, by CloudFlare-proofing it. All the while sitting in a shitty airline, with shitty food and shittier seats, hurtling across the pacific ocean.
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.
> The future is both amazing and shitty
I feel like we're living in one of those breathless futurist interviews from a 1994 issue of Wired mag.
No, I'm not William Gibson. Swear to god.
What about token usage? i've noticed that simple conversations balloon to 100k+ tokens within 1-3 messages. did you have this issue?
I have Claude Max subscription for the main agenttasks. Also use my OpenAI API and Gemini API access for sub-agent work.
Once my Olares One is here, will also be using local LLMs on open models.
https://one.olares.com/
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Did you ask OpenClaw to do all those things? If not did you want it to do all of them?
I asked it to check why the cron job kept failing, and it checked the cron payload and recommended reasons for the failure. I gave it the approval to go ahead and fix it. it tried different options (like trying different domains, and finally figured out the anti CF option).
the other tasks (like the MariaDB install and restore, python code refactoring) were a result of the initial requests made to Claw, like graphing my gmail email archives.
> hopped on a plane for SKO in LAX. United delayed the plane departure by 2 hours (of course) and diverted the flight to Honolulu.
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.
SKO ---> Sales Kick Off. Apologies for the acronym overdose
Haters gonna hate, but bro vibe-coded himself into being a billionaire and having Sam Altman and Zuck personally fight over him.
Proof you can get hired off of a portfolio where you've never even viewed a single line of code form it. Definitely feel a mix of envy and admiration.
It was never really about the code itself anyways.
To be fair, it's not like he did not read a single line of code that ended up being generated.
I'd tell those two off before taking a penny
money or morals, choose one
This reads simply as an “Our Incredible Journey” type of post, but written for an person rather than a company.
I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing I have to work for Sam Altman. Dude’s gross.
Who cares?
Somehow we've normalized running random .exe on our devices. Except now it's markdown.exe and and you sound like a zealot when advocating against it.
What should I do with all my video games?
My video games aren't connected to my email.
OpenClaw is literally the most poorly conceived and insecure AI software anyone has ever made. Its users have had OpenClaw spend thousands of dollars, and do various unwanted and irreversible things.
This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.
I would be inclined to believe you if you mentioned a single open-source agent that does more than OC. Just one.
Has it occurred to you that the fact that OpenClaw can do so much is exactly why it is problematic from a security point of view.
Move fast and break things...
Fuck
What to understand of this whole story:
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)
> Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor?
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...
What does VSCode fork spend 2 billion dollars on?
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It was a success for the company, but it is unlikely to survive long term. Now people are all focusing on Claude Code and Codex. Cursor is surviving because there are many folks that can't survive a terminal session. And because we are still in a transition stage where people look at the code, but will look at the code every day less, and more at the results and the prompts. And at the quality of the agent orchestration / tools. I don't believe the Cursor future will be bright. Anyway: my example was about how fast things are forgotten in this space.
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> Remember Cursor?
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.
I think Cursor is doing pretty well in the enterprise space. It seems much more useful than just throwing agents upon subagents on an unsuspecting task like Claude Code.
Cursor is fine, the example is about how things go out of hype in very little time. However I believe Cursor will not survive much. It is designed around a model that will not survive: that the AI "helps you writing code", and you review, and need an IDE like that. There are many developers that want an IDE and can't stand the terminal experience of Claude Code and Codex, but I don't believe most developers in the future will inspect closely the code written by the AIs, and things like Cursor will look like products designed for a transition step that is no longer here (already).
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>"What I want is to change the world"
Thank you, we already fucked. I am a hypocrite of course.
hahahahaha, bro jumped at the bag
Never understood the hype. Good for the guy but what was the product really? And he goes on and on about changing the world. Gimme a break. You cashed out. End of story.
Just connecting social platforms to agents. That's all. Anyone can code it, and the project was obviously vibe coded. For some reason it got viral.
Good for him, but no particular geniusness.
> For some reason it got viral.
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.
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This is easily the most successful tech grift I've ever seen.
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.
This tells you all you need to know about OpenAI, honestly.
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OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.
We're working on security and about 3 very key architectural improvements.
https://seksbot.com/
You're crossing into spamming this. Please don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028331.
I'm genuinely sorry to bring that up, but you need to work on naming and branding...
The branding is most likely intentional to be edgy (see also, Tesla's Model S, X, and Y), just with very shortsighted intentions because no one can pull that off in 2026 unless they are Elon Musk.
Just FYI, you might want to change that name unless you pivot in a very peculiar (tho potentially lucrative, if visa/mastercard don't ban you) niche.
My mum is not gonna use a product named like that
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We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive and/or trolling comments.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a picture of OpenClawCon in Vienna, not OpenAI.
https://x.com/andreasklinger/status/2021299260784882044
In case you are referring to the picture: that was taken in Vienna at ClawCon.
I think that photo is from an OpenClaw meetup.
The photo is from the recent Vienna meetup.
Of all the things to question, discuss & think about based on this news!
always the same people man... jeez
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Please help us all by not taking HN threads further into hellish flamewars, including (but not limited to) nationalistic or racial flamewars.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: since this account has been posting almost exclusively flamebait and ideological/political battle comments, I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
I think its a certain type of American, not necessarily Americans in general.
pretty much yea
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and a sausage fest.
Edit: picture is from a Vienna meet up. Not OpenAI.
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wow hype really is everything, good for him
Welcome :D
“ My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use”
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?
A hype vibe-bot maker joins a hype-vibe company that runs on fumes. Anything to keep the scam altman bubble going.
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What a blunder by Anthropic. We'll see what openclaw turns into and if it sticks around, but still a huge and rare blunder by anthropic
i dont think so, its trivial to spin up an openclaw clone. the only value here is the brand
I highly suspect he might even consider Anthropic since they enforced restrictions at some point on OpenClaw form using there APIs
yes that's the blunder I'm talking about
I am sure they made a bid. The blog makes it sounds like he talked to multiple labs.
they're (Anthropic) also the ones who have been routinely rug-pulling access from projects that try to jump onto the cc api, pushing those projects to oAI.
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OpenClaw was one of the more interesting “edges” of the open AI tooling ecosystem — not because of scale, but because of taste and clarity of direction.
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 agree, it's an interesting distortion to the traditional technology feedback loop.
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.
This feels less like an acquisition and more like signaling. OpenClaw isn’t infrastructure, it’s an experiment, and its value is narrative: “look what one person can build with our models.” OpenAI gets PR, optional talent, and no obligation to ship something deterministic.
The deeper issue is that agent frameworks run straight into formal limits (Gödel/Turing-style): once planning and execution are non-deterministic, you lose reproducibility, auditability, and guarantees. You can wrap that with guardrails, but you can’t eliminate it. That’s why these tools demo well but don’t become foundations. Serious systems still keep LLMs at the edges and deterministic machinery in the core.
Meta: this comment itself was drafted with ChatGPT’s help — which actually reinforces the point. The model didn’t decide the thesis or act autonomously; a human constrained it, evaluated it, and took responsibility. LLMs add real value as assistive tools inside a deterministic envelope. Remove the human, and you get the exact failure modes people keep rediscovering in agent frameworks.
Exactly. Unfortunately, it seems like the ship has sailed towards exploitation of the current local maximum (I got GPUs and Terawatts, let’s go!) instead of looking for something better.
Something very interesting happened to me yesterday.
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"
I believe that the rename to OpenClaw happened after the cutoff date for pretty much all model's training data, so unless you say something that causes them to look it up they'll get it wrong and assume it's about the old PC game. I was messing around trying to get different models to setup an OpenClaw NixOS VM for me and had to disambiguate for most of the models I tried.