← Back to context

Comment by vntok

2 months ago

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.

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.

    • Where is that figure from? I would be extremely surprised if that doesn't drop at least an order of magnitude as the hype wears off. Assuming it's even representative of today and not two months ago

      2 replies →

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?