Comment by danpalmer
2 months ago
"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean"
He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.
His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?
What’s ambitious about it? It’s a chatbot that glues APIs together.
The ambitious idea is actually giving a chatbot/agent access to a bunch of personal data and having it self-modify its harness and context to some extent.
The execution in case of Openclaw is a hot mess.
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How much does a SOUL.md cost?
But it costs $1.3m USD a month to run, not including their salaries. That's the cost of a team of 50-200 staff, depending on where you're hiring.
I don't think there's any way most people would call that lean. It's lean in exactly 1 axis which is people, but no one really cares about that, people is always a proxy for cost.
He said in another thread there's 6 people involved. 6 people for this project doesn't feel lean, without even considering the enormous LLM spend/complexity
3.2M active users. Not a huge staff to user ratio? One per half million users.
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The idea is lean, the execution is slop.
I wonder if compilers were ever considered 'slop'
If these methods prove successful it isn't going to matter. A user doesn't care if code is 'slop' or artisanal, so long as the app/site/whatever works.
If you can combine autonomous flows (and millions of dollars in tokens) to produce work comparable to a traditional engineering team, then why would the user care which wrote the app/site/whatever?
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