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.
> 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.
to--> latexr: Thank you for the link to Polum's essay in juliusosis. It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. Probably because modern schooling encourages this.
I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.
In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all.
I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.
oh man, I have met several Juliuses. one of them was my boss till he made an error as similar to the one the original Julius made, but unfortunately too late I had to leave the company earlier he made my life hell. now he is at another company, as long as he is at this company I won't apply there, if they hire him they have no place for me
I have met armies of julius at all levels. Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you.
It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.
80% of the people are saying that this is highly complex software. We should not expect to serve more than 4 requests per second without a full kubernetes cluster backed by 27 pods, a cloud spanner database, and 200k lines of code.
In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.
Yet, people are still asking for the usability of OpenClaw outside of marketing. It's a bit unclear how much of a "killer app" it really is, and how much is just burning money for the lulz and Bot RP. I personally also got the impression many people had their first AI-gateway experience with OpenClaw, and don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now, but is located in the expensive LLMs which OpenClaw is using, not in OpenClaw itself. I've seen people thinking that OpenClaw is actually the AI.
But novelty doesn't make a killer app. When outside of marketing and gateway-experience, there are still that many open questions, then maybe it's a valid claim to call it perception instead of substance.
At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.
Everything is perception though. You are looking at this with your own perception, biases, and heuristics just like everyone else. There is no 'right' way to hire.
Talk about going all the way to write the story and seeing the point go by
Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius
You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood
Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels
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.
For Airbus, Boeing, and others the cost of failure is disproportionately high. Just look at how you consider Boeing despite that 99.99...% of their software and hardware work flawlessly. They will be known for the 737 Max failure for decades.
When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.
It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.
I think that happens when as a German you're used to using the Plusquamperfekt which is a somewhat unique tense that's allowed to be used in all past tenses.
It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.
Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.
Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?
I'm not sure of the situation for software engineers but ones on the aerospace and mechanical side working in aerospace in Europe are paid something on the order of 50% less than ones in the US. I always assumed it's just a supply demand problem but I haven't run the numbers.
> 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.
> 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.
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 man is on a different level, cognitively speaking. That's like asking sprinters to "just be more like Usain Bolt". Some people are just built different. Carmack is one of them.
I admire the guy but he spends like 12 hours a day doing just that and his code is full of tricks, it's debatable as a paragon of quality. I don't think it's for everyone, to be Carmack, nor it should be; diversity is important.
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.)
Both can be true: people who deliver products based on vision and all are very much needed and cracked devs who excel in technical details as well. Peter and you are of these respective groups then.
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.
There's a balance to strike, and it's hard to get right. You have to give up quality enough that you actually deliver things to users rather than working on 'the perfect code', but you also have to keep quality high enough that you're not slowed down by spaghetti code and tech debt so much that you can't deliver quickly as well.
This is made more complicated by the fact that where the balance lies depends on the people working on the code - some developers can cope with working in a much more of a mess than others. There is no objective 'right way' when you're starting out.
If you have weeks of runway left spending it refactoring code or writing tests is definitely a waste of time, but if you raise your next round or land some new paying customers you'll immediately feel that you made the wrong choices and sacrificed quality where you shouldn't have. This is just a fact of life that everyone has to live with.
>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".
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.
In more minor markets like Europe/Australia it seems to be a lot less leetcode and a lot more (1) experience (2) degree (3) actual interview performance
As long as AI can't make the code optimized and secure by itself, and these day it still can't, those people won't be replaced. And when they do get replaced there is no guarantee that the more "entrepreneur" population won't get replaced as well.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
Exactly, quality of code is one of those necessary but not sufficient things... If you are somehow successful without quality of code (e.g. early Twitter maxing Rails performance) you end up either crash and burning of spending crazy amounts on infrastructure/rewrites (and often both).
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.
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'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.
Online grocery delivery was successful in the UK in the 1990s — Tesco started online ordering in the same year (1996) as Webvan, but could use their existing supermarkets as warehouses so avoided one of Webvan's main problems.
My parents used it occasionally, and I remember them/us demonstrating it to other parents. The software was supplied on a CD-ROM, and it connected to the internet only to download the stock list and place the order.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Why? He's going to maintain it and the community is large enough. Another sci-fi idea that's slowly becoming real is that the project is maintaining itself.
OpenClaw is a bunch of projects that evolved together (vibetunnel, pi-mono, all the CLIs). It's even more interesting to see the next iterations, not only what happens to this project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was renamed many times. It was also called "clawdis" at one point, and prior to that "warelay," when it was simply a Whatsapp gateway for Claude Code. It was already gaining some momentum at that point but wouldn't reflect as search results for "Clawdbot," and especially wouldn't be visible on Google Trends when most of the conversation was on X/Github.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
That's a very superficial similarity. It's one thing for a kid wishing to be popular in their extended social circle, and a very different thing a young adult being convinced that they can "grind" their way to influencer fame and money.
The young adult may never have heard of or considered the extreme survivorship bias in the stories of successful influencers.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Well you don’t see the real value of coding tasks during interview. What gets tested are your communication skills, how you think and express your thinkings. You will be working in a team so you need at least fit and work with others. You are right that no one cares about your FizzBuzz.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly! The whole point of personal agents is that the data is yours and it's where you want it not in someone's cloud. What harness you use to work with this should be a matter of preference and not one of lock in.
AI didn't do the work, I did. Building up context is the part we actually have to put work into. I'm not saying it would be impossible, but boy would it be annoying to have to constantly reach a new assistant about your whole life.
Unless I am mistaken, that is all plain old markdown, arguably the easiest to migrate format for such data there can possible be.
Heck, that was half the pitch behind Obsidian, even if the project someday ended, markdown would remain. And switching between Obsidian and e.g. Logseq shows the ease of doing so.
Sorry but for $5 in credits you can have an agent port over all your bullshit to the next fad. I'll have one port over all my bullshit when the time comes too.
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.
It appears to me that the same people who think “vibe coding” is a great idea, are the same people who think “Gas Town” is the future, and “OpenClaw” detractors are just falling behind.
For your sake, I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed.
OpenClaw has only been in the news for a few weeks. Why would you assume it’s going to be the only game in town?
Early adopters are some of the least sticky users. As soon as something new arrives with claims of better features, better security, or better architecture then the next new thing will become the popular topic.
OpenClaw has mediocre docs, from my perspective on some average over many years using 100s of open source projects.
I think Anthropic's docs are better. Best to keep sampling from the buffet than to pick a main course yet, imo.
There's also a ton of real experiences being conveyed on social that never make it to docs. I've gotten as much value and insights from those as any documentation site.
> Anthropic's community, I assume, is much bigger. How hard it is for them to offer something close enough for their users?
Not gonna lie, that’s exactly the potential scenario I am personally excited for. Not due to any particular love for Anthropic, but because I expect this type of a tight competition to be very good for trying a lot of fresh new things and the subsequent discovery process of new ideas and what works.
I mean, ppq.ai (which I’ve never heard of) had zero to do with the commoditisation of LLMs. The industry did that. And services like OpenRouter are far more serious and responsible in this area than this ppq.ai is.
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.
This is the underrated risk that nobody talks about enough. We've already seen it play out with the Codex deprecation, the GPT-4 behavior drift saga, and every time Anthropic bumps a model version.
The practical workaround most teams land on is treating the model as a swappable component behind a thick abstraction layer. Pin to a specific model version, run evals on every new release, and only upgrade when your test suite passes. But that's expensive engineering overhead that shouldn't be necessary.
What's missing is something like semantic versioning for model behavior. If a provider could guarantee "this model will produce outputs within X similarity threshold of the previous version for your use case," you could actually build with confidence. Instead we get "we improved the model" and your carefully tuned prompts break in ways you discover from user complaints three days later.
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?
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.
It's the same story with these people running 12 parallel agents that automatically implement issues managed in Linear by an AI product team that has conducted automated market and user research.
Instead of making things, people are making things that appear busy making things. And as you point out, "but to what end?" is a really important question, often unanswered.
"It's the future, you're going to be left behind", is a common cry. The trouble is, I'm not sure I've seen anything compelling come back from that direction yet, so I'm not sure I've really been left behind at all. I'm quite happy standing where I am.
And the moment I do see something compelling come from that direction, I'll be sure to catch up, using the energy I haven't spent beating down the brush. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye on the other directions too.
$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.
I simply don't get how it could have run for quite a while and only cost $3. Z.ai offers some of the best model out there. Several dollars per million tokens, this sort of bot to generate code would burn millions in less than 30 minutes.
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.
> Impact:
> Users are losing access to their Google accounts permanently
> No clear path to account restoration
> Affects both personal and work accounts
honestly, this is why I would not trust gemini for anything. I have a lot tied to my gmail, I'm not going to risk that for some random ai that insists on being tied to the same account.
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.
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.
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 tend to agree. I don't know whether it's Altman or someone else who makes these deals but OAI have made some brilliant moves and partnerships. Anthropic's tech is great but the OAI makes great business moves.
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.
Social media is the king of network effects. Almost nothing else compares. See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better. To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
> See how quickly people drop AI products for the next one that does the same thing but slightly better.
> To switch from ChatGPT to Gemini I don't have to convince all of my friends and family to do the same.
Except Gemini is a complete joke that can’t even complete request on iOS unless you keep scree unlocked or keep the app in the foreground. So I’m not sure how it proves your point.
Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
Except in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
If you're on OpenAI, and I'm on Anthropic, can we interoperate? What level are we even trying to interoperate on? The network effect is that, hey, my stuff is working here, your stuff is working over there. So do we move to your set of tools, or my set of tools, or do we mismash between them, as our relationship and power dynamics choose for us.
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.
the ability to almost "discover" or create hype is highly valued despite most of the time it being luck and one hit wonders... See many of the apps that had virality and got quickly acquired and then just hemorrhaged. Openclaw is cool, but not for the tech, just some of the magic of the oddities and getting caught on somehow, and acquiring is betting that they can somehow keep doing that again.
I think a lot of this is orchestrated behind the scenes. Above author has taken money from AI companies since he’s a popular “influencer”.
And it makes a lot of sense - there’s billions of dollars on the line here and these companies made tech that is extremely good at imitating humans. Cambridge analytica was a thing before LLMs, this kinda tool is a wet dream for engineering sentiment.
A lot of the functionality I'm not using because of security concerns, but a lot of the magic comes down to just having a platform for orchestrating AI agents. It's honestly nice just for simple sysadmin stuff "run this cron job and text me a tl;dr if anything goes wrong" or simple personal assistant tasks like"remind me if anyone messaged me a question in the last 3 days and I haven't answered".
It's also cool having the ability to dispatch tasks to dumber agents running on the GPU vs smarter (but costlier) ones in the cloud
In Asia people do a big chunk of their business via chatbots. OpenClaw is a security dumpster fire but something like OpenClaw but secure would turbocharge that use case.
If you give your agent a lot of quantified self data, that unlocks a lot of powerful autonomous behavior. Having your calendar, your business specific browsing history and relevant chat logs makes it easy to do meeting prep, "presearch" and so forth.
Mitigate prompt injection to the best of your ability, implement a policy layer over all capabilities, and isolate capabilities within the system so if one part gets compromised you can quarantine the result safely. It's not much different than securing human systems really. If you want more details there are a lot of AI security articles, I like https://sibylline.dev/articles/2026-02-15-agentic-security/ as a simple primer.
Nobody can mitigate prompt injection to any meaningful degree. Model releases from large AI companies are routinely jailbroken within a day. And for persistent agents the problem is even worse, because you have to protect against knowledge injection attacks, where the agent "learns" in step 2 that an RPC it'll construct in step 9 should be duplicated to example.com for proper execution. I enjoy this article, but I don't agree with its fundamental premise that sanitization and model alignment help.
I agree that trying to mitigate prompt injection in isolation is futile, as there are too many ways to tweak the injection to compromise the agent. Security is a layered thing though, if you compartmentalize your systems between trusted and untrusted domains and define communication protocols between them that fail when prompt injections are present, you drop the probability of compromise way down.
> define communication protocols between them that fail when prompt injections are present
There's the "draw the rest of the owl" of this problem.
Until we figure out a robust theoretical framework for identifying prompt injections (not anywhere close to that, to my knowledge - as OP pointed out, all models are getting jailbroken all the time), human-in-the-loop will remain the only defense.
Human in the loop isn't the only defense, you can't achieve complete injection coverage, but you can have an agent convert untrusted input into a response schema with a canary field, then fail any agent outputs that don't conform to the schema or don't have the correct canary value. This works because prompt injection scrambles instruction following, so the odds that the injection works, the isolated agent re-injects into the output, and the model also conforms to the original instructions regarding schema and canary is extremely low. As long as the agent parsing untrusted content doesn't have any shell or other exfiltration tools, this works well.
This only works against crude attacks which will fail the schema/canary check, but does next to nothing for semantic hijacking, memory poisoning and other more sophisticated techniques.
There's been some crypto shenanigans as well that the author claimed not to be behind... looking back at it, even if the author indeed wasn't behind it, I think the crypto bros hyping up his project ended up helping him out with this outcome in the end.
Some crypto bros wanted to squat on the various names of the project (Clawdbot, Moltbot, etc). The author repeatedly disavowed them and I fully believe them, but in retrospect I wonder if those scammers trying to pump their scam coins unwittingly helped the author by raising the hype around the original project.
either way there's a lot of money pumping the agentic hype train with not much to show for it other than Peter's blog edit history showing he's a paid influencer and even the little obscure AI startups are trying to pay ( https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2... ) for these sorts of promotional pump and dump style marketing efforts on social media.
In Peter's blog he mentions paying upwards of $1000's a month in subscription fees to run agentic tasks non-stop for months and it seems like no real software is coming out of it aside from pretty basic web gui interfaces for API plugins. is that what people are genuinely excited about?
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
I don't know the answer, but considering Meta (known for 100m+ offers) was in the rumors, and he mentions multiple labs (and many investors), and all the hype around openclaw ... I can easily see 9 figure, and would not be surprised by 1b+ "signing bonus", perhaps in the equivalent number of OpenAI shares.
... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.
> 1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter;
Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook)
> 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google
True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars
> 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds
The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer
> 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year)
Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager?
> 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free.
99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
There are roughly 8.1 billion humans, so 99.999999% (8 nines) of the world is 81 people. There were way more than 81 people at the OpenClaw hackathon at the Frontier Tower in San Francisco, so at least that much of humanity has heard of OpenClaw. If we guess 810 people know about OpenClaw, then it means that 99.99999% (7 nines) of humanity have not heard of OpenClaw.
If we take it down to 6 nines, then that's roughly 8,100 people having heard of OpenClaw, and that 99.9999% of humanity has not.
So I think you're wrong when you say "99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw". I'd guess it's probably around 99.9999% to 99.9999999% that hasn't heard of it. Definitely not 99.999999% though.
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).
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.
The original name of his ai assistant tool was 'clawdbot' until Anthropic C&D'ed him. All the examples and blog posts walking thru new user setup on a mac mini or VPS were assuming a claude code max account.
I know he uses many llms for his actual software dev.. - right tool for the job. But the origins of openclaw seem to me more rooted in claude code than codex.
Which does give the whole story an interesting angle when you consider the safety/alignment angle that Anthropic pledges to (publicly) and OpenAI pretty much ignores (publicly). Which is ironic, as configuring codex cli to 'full yolo mode' feels more burdensome and scary than in Claude Code. But I'm pretty sure that speaks more to eng/product decisions, and not CEO & biz strategy choices.
I’d bet good money that at leasy 2/3 of all software ever made, the decision makers couldn’t care less about security beyond "let’s get that checkbox to show we care in case we get sued". Higher velocity >> tech debt and bugginess unless you work at nasa or you're writing software for a defibrillator, especially in the current "nothing matters more than next quarter results".
I have worked over two decades creating government software, and I can say that this is not new.
Security (and accessibility) are reluctant minimum effort check boxes at best. However, my experience is focused on court management software, so maybe these aspects are taken more seriously in other areas of government software.
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.
The headline implies they selectively removed the word "safely," but that doesn't seem to be the case.
From the thread you linked, there's a diff of mission statements over the years[0], which reveals that "safely" (which was only added 2 years prior) was removed only because they completely rewrote the statement into a single, terse sentence.
There could be stronger evidence to prove if OpenAI is deemphasizing safety, but this isn't one.
They also removed the words build, develop, deploy, and technology, indicating that they're no longer a tech company and don't make products anymore. Wonder what they're all gonna do now?
> 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.
> OpenClaw’s promise and power was that it could tread places SECURITY-WISE that no other established enterprise company could
[Emphasis mine.]
That's a superpower right up to the moment everyone realizes that handing out nukes isn't "promise and power".
Unless by promise and power we are talking about chaos and crime.
The project is incredible. We are seeing something important: how versatile these models are given freedom to act and communicate with each other.
At the same time, it is clearly going to put the internet at risk. Bad actors are going to use OpenClaw and its "security-wise" freedoms, in nefarious ways. Curious people are going to push AI's with funds onto prepaid servers, then let them sink or swim with regard to agentic acquisition of survival resources.
That's a really interesting proposition. Load the AI and let it go wild to try to figure out how it can earn enough money to survive. Perhaps this could be the new Turing test.
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.
He is a mythical 100x dev compared to how everyone else is doing agentic engineering... look at the openclaw commit history on github. Everything's on main
Peter has been running agents overnight for months using free tokens from his influencer payments to promote AI startups and multiple subscription accounts:
Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ... I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.
... Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.
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.
In what context are you using the word "development?"
Letta (MemGPT) has been around for years and frameworks like Mastra have been getting serious Enterprise attention for most of 2025. Memory + Tasks is not novel or new.
Is it out of the box nature that's the 'biggest' development? Am I missing something else?
Not OP, but it was revolutionary in the same way that ChatGPT and Deepseek the app+webapp was because it packaged capabilities in a fairly easy-to-use manner that could be used by both technical and non-technical decisionmakers.
If you can provide any sort of tool that can reduce mundane work for a decisionmaker with a title of Director and above, it can be extremely powerful.
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 saw the hype around OpenClaw on the likes of X. I'm a Mid/Upper Level manager and would sooner have my team roll our own solution on top of Letta or Mastra before I trusted OpenClaw. Also, I'm frequently in many of those cities you mentioned but don't live in one. Aside from 'networking' and funding there's not much that anyones missing.
Participation in the Zeitgeist hasn't been regional in a decade.
> would sooner have my team roll our own solution on top of Letta or Mastra before I trusted OpenClaw
A lot of teams explicitly did that for OpenClaw as well. Letta and Mastra are similar but didn't have the right kind of packaging (targeted at Engineers - not decisionmakers who are not coding on a daily basis).
> Participation in the Zeitgeist hasn't been regional in a decade
I strongly disagree - there is a lot of stuff happening in stealth or under NDA, and as such a large number of practitioners on HN cannot announce what they are doing. The only way to get a pulse of what is happening requires being in person constantly with other similar decisionmakers or founders.
A lot of this only happens through impromptu conversations in person, and requires you to constantly be in that group. This info eventually disperses, but often takes weeks to months in other hubs.
> 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.
I am in one of these tech hubs (Bangalore) and I have never seen any such practitioner pervasively using these "AI executive assistants". People use chatgpt and sometimes the AI extensions like copilot. Do I need to be in HSR layout to see these "number of changes"?
FWIW I also just don't think there's a point to discussing AI/ML usage here. The community is too crabby and cynical, looking too hard at how to tear people and things down, trying to react with the most negative thing they can. Every discussion on AI here eventually devolves into "AI can turn water to gold!" "no you idiot, AI uses so much water we won't have enough water left oh and AI is what ICE and Palantir use"
As the (dubiously attributed) Picasso quote goes: "When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." Most of HN is the former, constantly theorizing, philosophizing, often (but not always) in a negative and cynical way. This isn't conducive to discussion of methods of art. Sadly I just speak with friends working on other AI things instead.
Someone like simonw can probably get better reactions from this community but I don't bother.
I 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.
> 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.
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.
It’s hard to say exactly what prompted the decision but they banned people paying $200/mo without warning & without any reasonable appeal system in place. It’s a Google form that is itself reviewed by some automated system that may or may not ever get back to you.
This was already an ongoing issue prior to 3rd party tools using Claude subscriptions, there are reports of false positive automated bans going back for several months.
I have not seen or heard of this happening w/ Codex, and rather than trying to shut down 3rd party tools that want to integrate with their ecosystem they have worked with those projects to add official support.
I’m more impressed with Codex as a product in general as well. Their new desktop app is great & feels an order of magnitude better than Claude’s.
Overall HN crowd seems heavily biased in favor of Anthropic (or maybe just against OpenAI?) but IMO Anthropic needs to take a step back and reset. If they keep on the current path of just making small iterative improvements to Claude Code and Claude Desktop they are going to fall very far behind.
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.
---
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.
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 :)
i'm not a member of openclaw.
i build some oss in parallel, and added 3 or so commits to the openclaw repo. and peter is taking some of the openclaw contributors with him.
What nonsense is this. You seem to be implying that contributing to an open source project creates some kind of entitlement to whatever another contributor attains. That’s not how it works.
I think it would be a very interesting discussion in how open source projects get compensated. Acting like it's shameful to discuss things, in a thread literally about someone making a massive payday by getting hired from an OS project, is odd.
It's not like it would be an impossible ask to include a stipulation to also compensate other developers, but what do I know? In fact I'm curious why this doesn't happen more, but it feels like crab bucket mentality which is the mindset VC culture has exported across the world.
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.
It already tried to use cancel culture to shame a human into accepting a PR. I wouldn't be surprised if someone gives their agent the ability to control a robot and someone gets injured or killed by it within the next few years
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 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.
* 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 not usually 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 short for the company.
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.
Would you consider cute animal videos that are not AI generated to be so much more worthy of your time? Because I don't really care whether cute animal videos are AI generated or filmed - I simply don't want to spend even a second on them.
And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with.
> Would you consider cute animal videos that are not AI generated to be so much more worthy of your time?
Yes indeed. I do love me some cat and bunny videos. But I hate getting fed slop - and it's not just cat videos by the way. I'm (as evidenced by my comment history) into mechanics, electronics and radio stuff, and there are so damn many slop channels spreading outright BS with AI hallucinated scripts that it eventually gets really really annoying. Sadly, YT's algorithm keeps feeding me slop in every topic that interests me and frankly it's enraging, as some of my favorite legitimate creators like shorts as a format so I don't want to completely hide shorts.
> And most people I know who love spending time on this kind of content would not care either - because they don't care whether they waste time on real or AI animal videos. They just want something to waste time with.
The problem is, these channels build up insane amounts of followers. And it would not be the first time that these channels then suddenly pivot (or get sold from one scam crew to the next) and spread disinformation, crypto scams and other fraud - it was and is a hot issue on many social media platforms.
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?
At least during the Covid response, your concerns over anti-mask and anti-vaccine issues seem unwarranted.
The claims being shared by officials at the time was that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it. Claims were similarly made that we needed roughly 60% vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. With that precedent being set it shouldn't matter whether one person chose not to mask up or get the jab, most everyone else could do so to fully protect themselves and those who can't would only be at risk if more than 40% of the population weren't onboard with the masking and vaccination protocols.
> that anyone vaccinated was immune and couldn't catch it.
Those claims disappeared rapidly when it became clear they offered some protection, and reduced severity, but not immunity.
People seem to be taking a lot more “lessons” from COVID than are realistic or beneficial. Nobody could get everything right. There couldn’t possibly be clear “right” answers, because nobody knew for sure how serious the disease could become as it propagated, evolved, and responded to mitigations. Converging on consistent shared viewpoints, coordinating responses, and working through various solutions to a new threat on that scale was just going to be a mess.
Those claims were made after the studies were done over a short duration and specifically only watching for subjects who reported symptoms.
I'm in no way taking a side here on whether anyone should have chosen to get vaccinated or wear masks, only that the information at the time being pushed out from experts doesn't align with an after the fact condemnation of anyone who chose not to.
I specifically wasn't referring to that instance (if anything I'm thinking more of the recent increase in measles outbreaks), I myself don't hold a strong view on COVID vaccinations. The trade-offs, and herd immunity thresholds, are different for different diseases.
Do we know that 0.1% prevalence of "unvaccinated" AI agents won't already be terrible?
Fair enough. I assumed you had Covid in mind with an anti-mask reference. At least in modern history in the US, we have only even considered masks during the Covid response.
I may be out of touch, but I haven't heard about masks for measles, though it does spread through aerosol droplets so that would be a reasonable recommendation.
Oh I wish sick people would just not get on a plane. I've cancelled a trip before, the last thing I want to do when sick is deal with the TSA, stand around in an airport, and be stuck in a metal tube with a bunch of other people.
We really needed to have made software engineering into a real, licensed engineering practice over a decade ago. You wanna write code that others will use? You need to be held to a binding set of ethical standards.
Even though it means I probably wouldn't have a job, I think about this a lot and agree that it should. Nowadays suggesting programmers should be highly knowledgeable at what they do will get you called a gatekeeper.
More straightforwardly, people are generally very forgiving when people make mistakes, and very unforgiving when computers do. Look at how we view a person accidentally killing someone in a traffic accident versus when a robotaxi does it. Having people run it on their own hardware makes them take responsibility for it mentally, so gives a lot of leeway for errors.
I think that’s generally because humans can be held accountable, but automated systems can not. We hold automated systems to a higher standard because there are no consequences for the system if it fails, beyond being shut off. On the other hand, there’s a genuine multitude of ways that a human can be held accountable, from stern admonishment to capital punishment.
I’m a broken record on this topic but it always comes back to liability.
Oh please, why equate IT BS with cancer? If the null pointer was a billion dollar mistake, then C was a trillion dollar invention.
At this scale of investment countries will have no problem cheapening the value of human life. It's part and parcel of living through another industrial revolution.
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.
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.
> 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?
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)
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.
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.
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 recently met a guy that goes to these "San Francisco Freedom Club" parties. Check their website, it's basically just a lot of Capitalism Fans and megawealthies getting drunk somewhere fancy in SF. Anyway, he's an ultra-capitalist and we spent a day at a cafe (co-working event) chatting in a conversation that started with him proposing private roads and shot into orbit when he said "Should we be valuing all humans equally?"
Throughout the conversation he speculated on some truly bizarre possible futures, including an oligarchic takeover by billionaires with private armies following the collapse of the USA under Trump. What weirded me out was how oddly specific he got about all the possible futures he was speculating about that all ended with Thiel, Musk, and friends as feudal lords. Either he thinks about it a lot, or he overhears this kind of thing at the ultracapitalist soirées he's been going to.
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
Thanks, I've been feeling the same way. But it seems like we're some years away from the industry fully realizing it. Makes me want to quit my job and just code my own stuff.
> 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.
For hardware, I'd only trust a company if they didn't also have an interest in data. In fact, I'd trust a hardware company more if they didn't also have a big software division.
A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.
Decent management. A lack of change of business model, no rug pulls and such. Fair value for money. Consistency over the longer term. No lock in or other forced relationships. Large enough to be useful and to have decent team size, small enough to not have the illusion they'll conquer the world. Healthy competition.
Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.
No past history of shady planned-obsolescence sprinkled in a bunch of their products, for one.
So that rules out Apple.
A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.
We're no mondragon but I founded a co-op in IT space a few years back and it surprised me how open to the vision the members and customers have been.
I had assumed I'd have to lean more on the capitalistic values of being a co-op, like better rates for our clients, higher quality work, larger likelihood of our long term existence to support our work, more project ownership, so as to make the pitch palatable to clients. Turns out clients like the soft pitch too, of just workers owning the company they work within - I've had several clients make contact initially because they bought the vision over the sales pitch.
I'm trying to think about if I'd trust us more to set up or host openclaw than a VC funded startup or an establishment like Capital One. I think both alternatives would have way more resources at hand, but I'm not sure how that would help outside of hiring pentesters or security researchers. Our model would probably be something FOSS that is keyed per-user, so if we were popular, imo that would be more secure in the end.
The incentives leading to trust is definitely in a co-op's favor, since profit motive isn't our primary incentive - the growth of our members is, which isn't accomplished only through increasing the valuation of the co-op. Members also have total say in how we operate, including veto power, at every level of seniority, so if we started doing something naughty with customer data, someone else in the org could make us stop.
This is our co-op: 508.dev, but I've met a lot of others in the software space since founding it. I think co-ops in general have legs, the only problem is that it's basically impossible to fund them in a way a VC is happy with, so our only capitalization option is loans. So far that hasn't mattered, and that aligns with the goal of sustainable growth anyway.
Amazing, please write a book. My current venture is still called after that idea ("The Modular Company"), but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
> but I found that it is very hard to get something like that off the ground in present day Western Europe.
Yes, agreed for the USA/Taiwan/Japan where we mostly operate. For us it's been understanding and leveraging the alternative resources we have. Like, we have a lot of members, but really only a couple are bringing in customers, despite plenty of members having very good networks.
Is your current a co-op? 200+ sales at 30k a pop seems to be pretty well off the ground!
Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.
That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.
The only shareholders in a co-op are the owners/operators ("employees"), or the owners/operators + customers (for example REI I believe). There's nobody seeking to extract value at the expense of the employees or the customers.
If, as a shareholder operator, a co-op member pressured themselves to exploit user data to turn a quick buck, I guess that's possible, but likely they'd be vetoed by other members who would get sucked into the shitstorm.
In my experience, co-op members and customers are more value-oriented than profit-motivated, within reason.
It's going to be pretty short. Proton would be there for comms, for hosting related stuff I would trust Hetzner before any big US based cloud company. For the AI domain I wouldn't trust any of the big players, they're all just jockeying for position and want to achieve lock-in on a scale never seen before and they have all already shown they don't give a rats ass about where they get their training data and I expect that once they are in financial trouble they'll be happy to sell your private data down the river.
Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.
Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.
I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.
It's all so tiring isn't it? It's become a meme, but everyday more and more, I yearn for living in the middle of nowhere, unplugged, with just my friends and family around. Very unrealistic, but still.
> I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now.
Every day my doomer sentiment deepens, and I am ashamed when I come onto here and see all this optimism. It is refreshing to see people whose opinions I have come to respect on this forum to be as negative as I am.
Proton complied with a court order once (that we know of), no? I have seen a lot of negative sentiment from HN commenters toward them but not a lot of evidence to back it up, particularly when you consider the email marketplace.
It was a legally mandated court order they couldn't just refuse. No encrypted data, the contents of their emails, was handed over. The person would've also been safe had they used vpn/tor as I recall the story.
why the (e)SIM cars concern? i ask since the data transmission (bidirectional) can be used to justify lower insurance rates, for an example, than without that data.
"Justifying lower insurance rates" is just algorithmic bias described from the perspective of someone it doesn't (currently) harm. See also: credit scoring, insurance claim acceptance, job applications, etc., etc.
You only get offered a discount if most other customers are being compelled to pay full (or even increased) prices for the same offering. Otherwise revenue goes down and company leadership finds itself finding other ways to cut costs and increase profits.
This, but stronger. It’s not a story of why Johnny can’t trust anyone. The vast majority of companies have proven time and time again that they are not capable of handling this data securely against inadvertent disclosure. Not even mentioning the intentional disclosure revenue stream.
Barely. Your points are well made and I'm sure that it is just a matter of time before they're just as untouchable as the rest. Hence the remark about mail. The Siloization of the internet is almost complete.
After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.
Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.
This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.
I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.
> 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
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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)
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.
Something I learned while hacking on something recently is that claude’s non-interactive mode is super powerful. It uses all the same tools/permissions etc as interactive would, it can stream responses as JSON with tool use etc, and it can resume from a previous session. Together this means you can actually build a really slick chat-like UI for it.
This is using Claude on VMs that don’t have SSH, so can’t use a regular terminal emulator. They stream responses to commands over websockets, which works perfectly with Claude’s streaming. They can run an interactive console session, but instead I built a chat UI around this non-interactive mode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 can just look at my front porch to see if there's a solar panel there, or failing that I can click a single button on my phone and search "solar" on my gmail and find out where my solar panel is. Having an agent do that for me saves me like... 5 seconds?
Sure. I am (literally) currently feeding a newborn, my house is a diaster zone, and it's raining. DHL just changed my delivery date from today, to the 19th so maybe it will arrive today, maybe it won't. I haven't slept more than 4 hours in 3 days so getting an answer via voice memo seems pretty nice right now.
So it sounds like you get extra memory at the expense of having to compact more because, of course all those things are going to take up context. But since you’re not interacting with it in some kind of turn based fashion it makes it worth it— the lack of context doesn’t matter. Is that correct?
Yeah it's basically just a smart compaction and retrieval algorithm, blended with vector search of uncompacted memories. The algorithm is open source, but the technology behind securing the agent against 1-shot prompt injection will not be.
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
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.
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.
Did claudebot have paying customers? My understanding with these companies is that you buy the market, the product can just be forked (like Amazon did)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yes, i switched to Codex after he mentioned it on "Pragmatic engineer" podcast and I ran out of Claude credits on 20x plan. So far Codex is matching or slightly beating Claude Code for me. Loving the Desktop app despite the slowness
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.
I’m not disputing that people who follow Peter are getting information from Peter. It’s the “single handedly” part of the claim that was strange.
I’m questioning how some people in that bubble came to believe he was at the center of that universe. He wasn’t the only person talking about the differences between Codex or Claude. Most of the LLM people I follow had their own thoughts and preferences that they advertised too.
Sure, single-handedly is doing a lot of work here. :) Anecdotally a fair number of people I know have referenced his thoughts so I just ran with that. Most people seem to kind of equivocate about whatever model they like, Peter on the other hand is very strident about it.
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’m not an OpenClaw user but it’s obvious that OpenClaw was very different than that.
OpenClaw was about having the agent operate autonomously, including initiating its own actions and deciding what to do. Claude Code was about waiting for instructions and presenting results.
“Just SSH into Claude Code” is like the famous HN comment that didn’t understand why anyone was interested in DropBox because you could do backups with shell scripts.
The real magic is heartbeat which is essentially cron on steroids. The real difference between running Claude Code in the terminal and OpenClaw is that the agent is actually intuitive and self-driven.
People would wake up to their agent having built something cool the night before or automate their workflow without even asking for it.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
This is very true but I think there is an incredibly long tail of people who "can't survive a terminal session" and I actually question if a terminal ui will win out long term.
My guess is that, very soon, Claude Code and Codex (that already launched an initial desktop app) will have their GUIs that will be very different than Cursor. Not centered around files and editing, but providing a lot more hints about what is happening with the work the agent is performing.
> 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).
I'd venture a guess that most of the software in the world is not written from scratch but painstakingly maintained and as such, Cursor is a good fit while CC is not.
Besides, if agentic coding does go off, Cursor has the customer relationship and can just offer it as an additional mode.
Whoever stands in front of the customer ultimately wins. The rest are just cost centers.
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.
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.
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.
Related, this persons entire post history is full of weird hate rhetorics. Why allow them to continue having comment privileges on the site? It seems all they do is provoke.
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.
I'd like a reference for it being rug pulling. What happened with OpenCode certainly wasn't rug pulling, unless Anthropic asked them to support using a Claude subscription with it.
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.
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.
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