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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 vulnerabilit

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.

spaceman_2020 8mo ago
Going by how insanely viral OpenClaw has been on X, I don’t think any of the stars were bought
- bananaboy 8mo ago
  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.
  - aixpert 8mo ago
    he likely poured oil into the flame investing a few hundred bucks to double the virality
    - spaceman_2020 8mo ago
      and according to HN, somehow that's a bad thing? Like making your own project more popular and successful using your own resources is...bad?
  - bogtap82 8mo ago
    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.
    - dieortin 8mo ago
      Even if the conversation was on other sites, people would still search for it.
- imiric 8mo ago
  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.
  - Gracana 8mo ago
    > He made a social network for bots, FFS. Matt Schlicht made Moltbook, not Peter Steinberger.
    - imiric 8mo ago
      Well, you got me. That changes everything.
pjmlp 8mo ago
I bet they did not invert a binary tree on the whiteboard, nor answered how many golf balls fit into a plane.
closewith 8mo ago
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.
- Traubenfuchs 8mo ago
  That wasn‘t true before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801
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cube00 8mo ago
> 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.
- sph 8mo ago
  pets.com moment
  - jeffrallen 8mo ago
    Nah, I'm getting more of a webvan vibe...
    - SJC_Hacker 8mo ago
      The irony about Webvan, it was a good idea, but too early. Kinda like the Apple Newton
      - Symbiote 8mo ago
        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.
- jrowen 8mo ago
  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.
- deleted 8mo ago
rippeltippel 8mo ago
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.
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qingcharles 8mo ago
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...
- AlexCoventry 8mo ago
  He didn't even have to be the one buying them. Lots of people benefit from a tool like OpenClaw getting popular.
westonplatter0 8mo ago
He also spent 13 years building [an] OCR document engine company (PSPDFKit) before becoming an "overnight" vibe coder success story.
- indemnity 8mo ago
  His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space. He’s not just a “vibe coder”.
  - u02sgb 8mo ago
    There's an excellent Changelog podcast interviewing him which talks about his early career as well.
erikbye 8mo ago
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.
- almostdeadguy 8mo ago
  Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.
- mdavid626 8mo ago
  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.
  - onion2k 8mo ago
    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.
- johnebgd 8mo ago
baby 8mo ago
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)
jrowen 8mo ago
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.
democracy 8mo ago
I don't know this guy's abilities so can't comment on that, but looking at how much AI companies spend on marketing - that's a great hire.
tin7in 8mo ago
If you read his blog you’ll find about a lot of his engineering decisions. Peter was right about a lot of the nuances of coding agents and ways to build software over the last 9 months before it was obvious.
- mattmanser 8mo ago
  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.
  - tin7in 8mo ago
    > No-one's going to maintain it. 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.
    - mattmanser 8mo ago
      We've been here a 1,000 times. This exact news happens over and over again on HN. Why would it be any different from the other times this happens? This is what US tech companies do to stay dominant. Buy and kill. This project will die now, that's the point of buying him. For super cheap too but the sound of it.
      - MangoCoffee 8mo ago
        Openclaw is an open source project. that's the beauty of the Open source. the community can take over and people can fork it. there already many clone of openclaw.
CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
> 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.
loandbehold 8mo ago
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.
- stingraycharles 8mo ago
  I genuinely think people on HN are having the misconception that vibe coding == don’t care about (the quality of) the code. I like to think it’s the same as delegating implementation to someone else.
  - matthewkayin 8mo ago
    Except there are literally people on this thread saying that this is proof that code quality doesn't matter and that we all need to "wake up". It's the same as the people saying that spec driven development is the way of the future and that engineers should be focusing on the spec and not even looking at the code. If you use LLMs and you do care about code quality, then great. But remember that the term vibe coding as it was coined originally meant blindly accepting coding agent suggestions without even reviewing the diffs. Many of the people aggressively pushing AI use in code are doing so because they care more about delivery products quickly then they do about the software's performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is why many of us are pushing back against the technology.
    - sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
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Ultimatt 8mo ago
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.
malthaus 8mo ago
it's a tough pill to swallow for developers, but nobody cares about your ability to write code. people care about you shipping something people want. i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen
- dinkumthinkum 8mo ago
  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?
  - nedt 8mo ago
    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.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- dns_snek 8mo ago
  That's such a bizarre thing to claim when offshoring software development has historically been a huge failure. You've always needed competent technical staff with even more demanding management requirements to stand a chance.
ookblah 8mo ago
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.
teekert 8mo ago
It’s not the code. It’s the vision and the can-do attitude. And perhaps a bit of the (earned) name.
enieslobby 8mo ago
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.
- imjonse 8mo ago
  > a project that people want, do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?
  - elAhmo 8mo ago
    Many people use it. Also he made a few other products, some of which were used probably by more than a billion people.
  - Flockster 8mo ago
    Judging by the Openrouter-Rankings it is No. 1 or 2 in token usage, depending on the view (daily, weekly, monthly).
    - dieortin 8mo ago
      Most LLM usage does not go through Openrouter. Most people access LLMs thorough ChatGPT, Gemini etc. apps, integrations into popular products… The percentage of total tokens being handled by Openrouter is a tiny blip
imjonse 8mo ago
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.
wasmainiac 8mo ago
> 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.
- throwaway2037 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - m000 8mo ago
    > 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.
    - tredre3 8mo ago
      Your comment applies equally well to aspiring actors. The similarity between actors and influencers is more than superficial.
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benreesman 8mo ago
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.
Kiro 8mo ago
> We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. Why this insinuation? The project went massively viral and was even covered in my local newspaper. I don't see any reason to doubt those numbers.
- LtWorf 8mo ago
  As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?
  - Kiro 8mo ago
    Yeah, the small local newspaper for my town of 30k is a paid shill for OpenClaw. Amazing comment.
throw444420394 8mo ago
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.
- philipallstar 8mo ago
  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.
FreeRadical 8mo ago
Read his backstory. He’s a high quality software engineer by background.
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BryantD 8mo ago
The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?
nb777 8mo ago
No need to be jealous. If you'd have watched some of the interviews of this guy then you'd know that he's not vibe coding.
column 8mo ago
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.
catwell 8mo ago
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.
- debugnik 8mo ago
  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.
  - planb 8mo ago
    ClawHub isn't even useful. You can just point tell your OpenClaw agent you want it to do, and it will implement it. No need to rely on someone else's code^H^H^H^H textual descriptions of how to do talk to service xzy.
- deanc 8mo ago
  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.
  - stitched2gethr 8mo ago
    I think that's partly the point. This is the tool that everyone wanted but couldn't quite describe. Not saying he's a genius, but he was the first to will it into existence.
citizenpaul 8mo ago
HN Really hates understanding business. All these comments, yet no one has gotten the answer right. OpenAI bought marketing and now someone else cannot buy openclaw and lock out Openai revenue from a project that is gaining momentum. There are a many of these business moves that seem like nonsense. 1. Bought for marketing. 2. Adversarial hire. ie hire highly skilled people before your competitors can even if you don't have anything for them do to. Yet... 3. Acqu-hire. Buy a company when you really just want some of the staff. 4. Buy Customers. You don't care about the product and intend to migrate their customers to your system. 5. Buy competition before its a threat.
thorio 8mo ago
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.
wanderingmind 8mo ago
Whenever technically more capable folks diss the growth of a non technical person into bigger roles, I'm obligated to post this Steve Jobs video being asked about Java. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6
eviks 8mo ago
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". It doesn't? You'd need to know the odds for the tell. Like how many incompetent grifters are there, how many of them become hugely successful?
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nedt 8mo ago
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.
seanoreillyza 8mo ago
Do good or at least useful work in public and you'd be surprised at what can happen.
seydor 8mo ago
I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt
bjourne 8mo ago
Props for admitting jealousy and for being honest! I often feel the same way when fixing bugs in others code.
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cgfjtynzdrfht 8mo ago
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anilakar 8mo ago
> 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.
imtringued 8mo ago
It's also from a guy who rebranded three times (Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw) in a row and this is technically his fourth rebrand.
gadders 8mo ago
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.
21asdffdsa12 8mo ago
One day Atlas may shrug, but not today, atlast..
PurpleRamen 8mo ago
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.
sauercrowd 8mo ago
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.
- jonmc12 8mo ago
  Also surprised; building something people want and proving it is the unlock. HN first principle since the beginning.
girvo 8mo ago
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success" Kids and young people have known this forever at this point. Sadly.
elAhmo 8mo ago
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.
b3lvedere 8mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AKKmqGvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AKKmqGvE Semantics and grammar joke aside.. there are not many workers remembered in history. Only the so-called absolute greatest, meanest, etc are remembered. Nobody remembers the people who worked on the pyramid, but everyone knows some Farao. In this case they hired someone who has 'mastered' the use of their own tool(s). Like if Home Depot hired a guy who has almost perfect knowledge of each and every tool in their own portfolio. I'm not really sure if i want to be that guy.
ryanar 8mo ago
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.
- bhaak 8mo ago
  If you just commit AI generated code without even looking at it it doesn't matter how many years of engineering experience you have.
blueblazin 8mo ago
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?
alberto467 8mo ago
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.
antfarm 8mo ago
>We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks >We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. And we have a company whose product should adhere to the highest security standards possible, hiring this guy.
qmr 8mo ago
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Well duh. I thought that was well understood. The other option is having well-to-do parents a la Musk or Gates. Have you tried that?
powerapple 8mo ago
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.
nasmorn 8mo ago
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.
koe123 8mo ago
In my view this is just an aquihire to get a headline and take ownership over this trend. Yet another pivot to build hype.
123malware321 8mo ago
dont be jealous. working for some evil corporate is soulsucking for most humans. Only few thrive in such environments. most will try to get quick $$ and exit before they feel completely dead inside.
swiftcoder 8mo ago
> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". I'm pretty sure that's meant to be the general lesson of the last 20 years or so in Silicon Valley, but it's just survivorship bias in action. You don't hear a whole lot about the quietly successful engineers who work a 9-till-5 and then go home to see their wife and kids. But you do constantly hear about the folks who made it big YOLO'ing their career and finances on the latest a startup/memecoin/vibecoded app...
- morningsam 8mo ago
  Exactly. This whole thing just seems like a repeat of Flappy Bird to me. What was the "lesson" of Flappy Bird for game developers? That you should make very small, very simple games? How has that worked out for the vast majority of copycats who tried? The truth is there isn't any lesson, other than "sometimes people play the lottery, get lucky and win". Most people who play won't, though.
DivingForGold 8mo ago
If all the above is true, why didn't Sam & Co just replicate his product and offer their own improved version - - with security incorporated within ?
- ass22 8mo ago
  Because he wanted to say "Take that" To anthropic who forced Pete to change the name of the product.
Aperocky 8mo ago
Vibe coding is just a tool - same with programming languages and compilers. The product being useful and well received by user and market is still the ultimate test. Whether something is vibe coded or not does not matter.
chvid 8mo ago
Maybe think of this as a hiring of a marketer and tech influencer. And someone with the chops to create a viral product.
- jimmydoe 8mo ago
  Exactly. If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.
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haebom 8mo ago
Would you like to have it removed? https://github.com/oswarld/openshears https://github.com/oswarld/openshears
hmokiguess 8mo ago
I think you’re conflating things. You probably are not jealous but rather frustrated and coming from a point of a false dichotomy trying to equal your position to his. If you were to stop and actually compare your lives you would likely find very different humans. It’s easy to fall into this trap sometimes, don’t let it get into your head. Be grateful for being you and enjoy what life has to offer you instead.
Danidada 8mo ago
This is such a strange take to be the top comment of “hacker” news. Why are we shaming someone who “hacked” something together and made it open source?
motbus3 8mo ago
I think it is unfortunate that this is happening. After all the mishaps and wrongdoings I don't want see anyone joining openai
aerhardt 8mo ago
> We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. This is isn’t right. He says very clearly in the recent Lex Fridman podcast that he looks at critical code (ex: database code). He said he doesn’t look at things like Tailwind code.
turtlebro 8mo ago
Ugh. Have we all forgotten that jealousy is the absolute opposite of a good virtue. Why does this get upvoted? Hacker News in a truly despicable state these days when this is what bubbles to the top. It saddens me to see that all the good people here have left or stopped participating. When we hear how rotten social media is, this also includes HN.
thecupisblue 8mo ago
It's not about the code, it's about the vibe. Also, Peter is quite well known in the dev circles, and especially in mobile development communities for his work on PSPDFKit. It is not like he's some unknown developer that just blew up - he owned a dev tooling company for over 10+ years, contributed a lot to the community and is a great dev.
conradev 8mo ago
Peter has been prolific and talented long before AI tools. I became familiar with his work a decade ago: https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView People seem to think that because we all have the same tools and because they’re increasingly agentic, that the person wielding the tool has become less relevant, or that the code itself has become less relevant. That is just not the case, at least yet, and Peter is applying a decade plus of entrepreneurial and engineering experience.
- BoggleFiend 8mo ago
  He was recently interviewed on Pragmatic Engineer, a podcast whose guests almost always have very impressive technical careers (the episode before him was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the VP of Data and Analytics at AWS and the episode after him is Brady Gooch, the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM) I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot. Worth a listen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-cl...
danmaz74 8mo ago
> vibecoded without reading any of the code Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company I think the whole OpenClaw arc has been fun to follow, but this sudden turn away from OpenClaw and toward the author as a new micro-celebrity that ended with OpenClaw being sidelined to a foundation was not what I saw coming. Congrats to Pete for getting such an amazing job out of this, but it does feel strange that only a few days ago he was doing the podcast circuit and telling interviewers he has no interest in joining AI labs. I don’t think this story arc should be seen as something replicable. Many have been trying to do the same thing lately: Hyping their software across social media and even podcasts while trying to turn it into cash. Steve Yegge is the example that comes to mind with his desperate attempts to scare developers into using his Gas Town (telling devs “dude you’re going to get fired” if they don’t start using his orchestration thing). The best he got out of it was a $300K crypto pump and dump scam and a rapidly dropping reputation as a result. Individuals who start popular movements have always been targets for hiring at energetic companies. In the past the situation has been reversed, though: Remember when the homebrew creator was rejected from Google because he didn’t pass the coding interview? (Note he later acquiesced to say that Google made the right call at the time). That time, the internet was outraged that he was not hired, even though that would have likely meant the end of homebrew. I do think we’ll be seeing a lot of copycat attempts and associated spam promoting them (here on HN, too, sadly) much like how when people see someone get success on YouTube or TikTok you see thousands of copycats pop up that go nowhere. The people who try to copycat their way into this type of success are going to discover that it’s not as easy as it looks.
shin_lao 8mo ago
See that as winning the "startup lottery", that doesn't mean what he did is rational or smart, he just had a great outcome. In trading it's the same, you can make stupid bets and make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're good trader. Nothing to conclude from this, this kind of hype-fueled outcome has always been a part of life.
mvkel 8mo ago
This should be a wake up call. A product's value is not a function of its code elegance. Nobody who matters notices the code, or cares. This is hugely inspiring to the most lazy+clever engineers, because it frees up so many thinking calories. Instead of trying to perfectly choreograph every bit of architecture to optimize for 1M concurrent users, you can spend 0.1 of the time and get things out the door, where you learn if spending even a minute of your time was worth it. Even better, when you realize tech debt is something that never needs to be paid down, you can focus all your energy on evolving your thinking patterns, not being bogged down in refactoring things that you've spiritually moved on from. An engineer's time is so precious; it needs to be spent thinking, not coding.
runjake 8mo ago
> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks > We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. Peter was pretty open about all of this. He doesn't hide the fact. It was a personal hack that took off and went viral. > We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. My guess, from his unwillingness to take the free pile of cash from the bags.fm grift, is that this in unlikely. I don't know that I would've been able to make the same decision. > Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company. Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed? Well, this is what happened here. Yes, I'd hire him. He's imaginative and productive and ships and documents things. I can fix the code auditing problem. > In this timeline, I'm not sure I find anything inspiring here. Okay? > It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Peter has been in the trenches for years and years, shipped and sold. He's written and released many useful tools over the years. Again, this was a project of personal love that went viral. This is not an "overnight success" situation. > So am I jealous, yes because this timeline makes no sense as a software engineer. But am I happy for the guy, yeah I also want to make lots of money someday. Write and release many, many useful tools. Form a community and share what you're building and your chances will greatly increase?
elwatto 8mo ago
nah. focus on building cool things people want.
j45 8mo ago
He didn't create or release something as finished. He built something and shared it. People took liberties with it. It's not about getting viral/lucky... it's about enjoying experimenting and learning. Money follows your unique impact and imprint in these kinds of cases.
mempko 8mo ago
Don't forget he also had Sam Altman's phone number. Do you any of you have his number? Also before he did all this he was semi retired for 5 years because of a successful exit. So for anyone thinking they can replicate this ask... 1. Are you already rich? Do you have cash in the bank to vibecode a project fulltime for many months just for fun? 2. Do you have Sam Altman's (or similar) number?
edstarch 8mo ago
Such is life in the attention economy.
h14h 8mo ago
OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model providers have created tools (the LLMs) with unprecedented new capabilities. The key problems are a) these new tools have weird limitations that make them hard to deploy effectively, and b) these tools are so fundamentally new that creating useful products out of them is an exercise in discovery and requires incredibly novel, forward-thinking vision. Pete, more than anyone in the OSS community IMO, exemplifies both of these qualities. He is living very much on the bleeding edge, so yes, the 10s of projects he's shipped faster than most devs can ship 1 are not as polished as if he'd created them by hand. But he's been pushing the envelope in ways that few, if any, are, and I'd argue that OpenClaw is much more the result of Pete living on that edge and understanding the trade-offs of these tools better than just about anyone. Personally, I'm much more jealous of the fact that Pete has already had a successful exit under his belt and had the freedom to explore & learn these tools to the fullest. There is definitely a degree of luck involved with the degree to which OpenClaw took off, but that Pete discovered it is 100% earned IMO.
sathish316 8mo ago
Peter clarified “I don’t read code” part in Lex Fridman interview - he said “I don’t read the boring parts of the code” that are about data transformation or writing to/reading from databases. He distinguished between what he calls “Agentic Engineering” and “Vibe coding”, and claimed majority of the time he is not just Vibe coding. He has 80,000+ GitHub contributions in a year across 50+ projects. I’m not sure how he averages 200 commits per day by just looking at diffs from a terminal, but it’s just Superhuman - https://github.com/steipete https://github.com/steipete
bluerooibos 8mo ago
I've seen the same result play out a few times on LinkedIn - random person studying for an MS in CS or AI, blogs and posts about stuff they're vibe coding with Lovable or whatever, builds a decent following, and then, from tagging various AI-related firms, lands a job at one of them. The field has kind of been like this for a while - people with portfolios of proven work done, showcasing yourself and your personality via blogs or vlogs makes you sort of a known quantity, versus someone with just a CV and a LinkedIn page. This is yet another example of an area where extroverts have an advantage. You could be 10x the engineer that the creator of OpenClaw is, but that's irrelevant in this timeline if nobody has ever heard of you.
neop1x 8mo ago
Good for him! But it is possible he won't stay there for a long time. Like Geohot at Apple. There is a difference between working on a fun project which you completely control and being under a constant pressure and having to follow constrains and requirements set by managers in a corporation.
jstummbillig 8mo ago
You could always get, mh, lucky. That is the most common startup exit plan: Finding someone who pays for half a business or an idea. Now it happens more quickly. Everything does. But that path was never about writing good code.
svnt 8mo ago
Jealousy is exactly the reaction they are hoping to trigger: use our tools, build something popular, get paid out. What better marketing spend than buying this project.
skeptic_ai 8mo ago
I was jealous too until I realized this is just an ad for OpenAI. They want to show you can vibe code an app and actually become a millionaire. What better way to show than actually do it? Well, here you have it, a low effort to wire up a few tools together with spaghetti gen ai and he’s millionaire in a few months. Ok, I might be mean by saying no effort, I actually don’t know. But I know vibe coding won’t work for more than a few weeks. Also I think this bot is just a connector to multiple open source libraries that connect to WhatsApp and other services. This is the best ad to sell AI: you can be millionaire too if you use our ChatGPT to vibe code stuff. I think it will get a negative reaction in a few weeks when the dust settles as technical people realize it’s an ad. Note: he might be an amazing developer but the ad still stands. Edit: from Gemini: Publicly Embarrassing Anthropic: The timing is brutal. Anthropic’s legal team forcing a name change (from "Clawdbot" to "Moltbot" to "OpenClaw") alienated the very developer who was driving millions of users to their model. OpenAI swooping in to hire him days later frames Anthropic as "corporate lawyers" and OpenAI as "friends of the builders." It’s a perfect narrative victory.
secbear 8mo ago
I feel similar... OpenClaw has lots of vulnerabilities, and it's very messy, but it also brought self-hosted cron-based agentic workflows to your favorite messaging channel (iMessage, telegram, slack, WhatsApp, etc.), which shouldn't be overlooked
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
> 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. I have a feeling that OpenAI and Anthropic both use AI to code a lot more than we think, we definitely know and hear about it at Anthropic, I havent heard it a lot at OpenAI, but it would not surprise me. I think you 100% can "vibe code" correctly. I would argue, with the hours you save coding by hand, and debugging code, etc you should 100% read the code the AI generates. It takes little effort to have the model rewrite it to be easier to read for humans. The whole "we will rewrite it later" mentality that never comes to pass is actually possible with AI, but its one prompt away.
- chillacy 8mo ago
  Boris has been very open about the 100% AI code writing rate and my own experience matches. If you have a typescript or common codebase, once you set your processes up correctly (you have tests / verification, you have a CLAUDE or AGENTS.md that you always add learnings to, you add skill files as you find repeatable tasks, you have automated code review), its not hard to achieve this. Then the human touch points become coming up with what to build, reviewing the eng plans of the AI, and increasingly light code review of the underlying code, focusing on overall architectural decisions and only occasionally intervening to clean things up (again with AI)
  - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
    I'm aware I've been building my own alternative to Beads for weeks now. the instructions.md file and something like Beads is epic. https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails I didnt like how married to git hooks beads was, so I made my own thats primarily a SQLite workhorse. Been using it just the same as I have used Beads, works just as good, drastically less code. I added a concept called "gates" to stop the AI model from just closing tasks without any testing or validation (human or otherwise) because it was another pain point for me with Beads. I fully sync the issues to GitHub to boot. https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues Works both ways, to GitHub, from GitHub. When you claim a task, its supposed to update on GitHub too (though looking at the last one I claimed, doesnt seem to be 100% foolproof yet).
tom_m 8mo ago
I mean some might say that's like joining a sinking ship. Of course one man's trash is another man's treasure. To each their own. Hiring in tech has been broken for many many years at this point. There's so much noise and only more noise coming now with AI. To be completely honest it's entire random from my end when hiring. We can't review every application that comes in. It's just impossible. We do weed out some of the spam of course and do get to real people that actually fit the requirements, but there's so many other talented people who would easily fit the role that simple get buried under applications. It's depressing from all sides here. No one should think that they aren't any good or did something wrong or didn't network enough... because the unfortunate truth is that getting a job in tech is a lottery. Something many don't want to admit.
- ass22 8mo ago
  Im working on a project to change this. Funny that you mention 'real people'. There are a number of components that sit at the core of what Im building - it should allow you to have the time and reach to vet more (100% verified) candidates than you ever could before. I also want to reduce the explicit costs of hiring so that firms can hire more people.
buschleague 8mo ago
This isn't a surprise at all. I sat down with the dev team at OpenAI during dev day last year and the biggest shocker to me: these "kids" are over here vibe coding the whole damn thing.
figassis 8mo ago
You don't get hired for any of that. OpenAI did not hire him because he went viral. Virality brought something interesting to OpenAI's attention. And they thought they could use this product idea/vision/execution, GTM strategy, whatever, and because it didn't seem like OAI had anyone on their team capable of this, they hired him. Simple as that. Don't feel jealous, trying to replicate won't work, he did not know he'd be hired, he built something that he found interesting, and then realized it would be interesting to a lot more people. The way to reach success is to either be strategically consistent in a way that maximizes luck surface area but does not depend on it, or to be unexpectedly lucky. The latter is gambling, People win the lottery regularly, does not mean you should make that your mission. Be comfortable with not being the one to hit gold. And yes, it's ok to be jealous. Take a moment and then go back and enjoy the rest of your life. Finally, there are a lot of companies that would likely hire you, hoping to hit gold. But you are likely filtering them out because they're not tech/large/startupy enough for you. These companies are wondering what they need to attract talent like you.
re5i5tor 8mo ago
I shared a lot of these uninformed (speaking only for myself) opinions, but have a lot more respect for Peter after listening to his recent 3hr interview with Lex Fridman. I came away liking and respecting.
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jv22222 8mo ago
The billion dollar homepage.
NuclearPM 8mo ago
What the heck is “softwares”?

spaceman_2020 8mo ago

Going by how insanely viral OpenClaw has been on X, I don’t think any of the stars were bought

bananaboy 8mo ago
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.
- aixpert 8mo ago
  he likely poured oil into the flame investing a few hundred bucks to double the virality
  - spaceman_2020 8mo ago
    and according to HN, somehow that's a bad thing? Like making your own project more popular and successful using your own resources is...bad?
- bogtap82 8mo ago
  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.
  - dieortin 8mo ago
    Even if the conversation was on other sites, people would still search for it.
imiric 8mo ago
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.
- Gracana 8mo ago
  > He made a social network for bots, FFS. Matt Schlicht made Moltbook, not Peter Steinberger.
  - imiric 8mo ago
    Well, you got me. That changes everything.

pjmlp 8mo ago

I bet they did not invert a binary tree on the whiteboard, nor answered how many golf balls fit into a plane.

closewith 8mo ago

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.

Traubenfuchs 8mo ago
That wasn‘t true before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801
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cube00 8mo ago

> 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.

sph 8mo ago
pets.com moment
- jeffrallen 8mo ago
  Nah, I'm getting more of a webvan vibe...
  - SJC_Hacker 8mo ago
    The irony about Webvan, it was a good idea, but too early. Kinda like the Apple Newton
    - Symbiote 8mo ago
      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.
jrowen 8mo ago
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.
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rippeltippel 8mo ago

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.

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qingcharles 8mo ago

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...

AlexCoventry 8mo ago
He didn't even have to be the one buying them. Lots of people benefit from a tool like OpenClaw getting popular.

westonplatter0 8mo ago

He also spent 13 years building [an] OCR document engine company (PSPDFKit) before becoming an "overnight" vibe coder success story.

indemnity 8mo ago
His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space. He’s not just a “vibe coder”.
- u02sgb 8mo ago
  There's an excellent Changelog podcast interviewing him which talks about his early career as well.

erikbye 8mo ago

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.

almostdeadguy 8mo ago
Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.
mdavid626 8mo ago
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.
- onion2k 8mo ago
  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.
johnebgd 8mo ago

baby 8mo ago

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)

jrowen 8mo ago

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.

democracy 8mo ago

I don't know this guy's abilities so can't comment on that, but looking at how much AI companies spend on marketing - that's a great hire.

tin7in 8mo ago

If you read his blog you’ll find about a lot of his engineering decisions. Peter was right about a lot of the nuances of coding agents and ways to build software over the last 9 months before it was obvious.

mattmanser 8mo ago
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.
- tin7in 8mo ago
  > No-one's going to maintain it. 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.
  - mattmanser 8mo ago
    We've been here a 1,000 times. This exact news happens over and over again on HN. Why would it be any different from the other times this happens? This is what US tech companies do to stay dominant. Buy and kill. This project will die now, that's the point of buying him. For super cheap too but the sound of it.
    - MangoCoffee 8mo ago
      Openclaw is an open source project. that's the beauty of the Open source. the community can take over and people can fork it. there already many clone of openclaw.

CobrastanJorji 8mo ago

> 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.

loandbehold 8mo ago

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.

stingraycharles 8mo ago
I genuinely think people on HN are having the misconception that vibe coding == don’t care about (the quality of) the code. I like to think it’s the same as delegating implementation to someone else.
- matthewkayin 8mo ago
  Except there are literally people on this thread saying that this is proof that code quality doesn't matter and that we all need to "wake up". It's the same as the people saying that spec driven development is the way of the future and that engineers should be focusing on the spec and not even looking at the code. If you use LLMs and you do care about code quality, then great. But remember that the term vibe coding as it was coined originally meant blindly accepting coding agent suggestions without even reviewing the diffs. Many of the people aggressively pushing AI use in code are doing so because they care more about delivery products quickly then they do about the software's performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is why many of us are pushing back against the technology.
  - sarmasamosarma 8mo ago
    [dead]

Ultimatt 8mo ago

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.

malthaus 8mo ago

it's a tough pill to swallow for developers, but nobody cares about your ability to write code. people care about you shipping something people want. i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen

dinkumthinkum 8mo ago
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?
- nedt 8mo ago
  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.
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dns_snek 8mo ago
That's such a bizarre thing to claim when offshoring software development has historically been a huge failure. You've always needed competent technical staff with even more demanding management requirements to stand a chance.

ookblah 8mo ago

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.

teekert 8mo ago

It’s not the code. It’s the vision and the can-do attitude. And perhaps a bit of the (earned) name.

enieslobby 8mo ago

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.

imjonse 8mo ago
> a project that people want, do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?
- elAhmo 8mo ago
  Many people use it. Also he made a few other products, some of which were used probably by more than a billion people.
- Flockster 8mo ago
  Judging by the Openrouter-Rankings it is No. 1 or 2 in token usage, depending on the view (daily, weekly, monthly).
  - dieortin 8mo ago
    Most LLM usage does not go through Openrouter. Most people access LLMs thorough ChatGPT, Gemini etc. apps, integrations into popular products… The percentage of total tokens being handled by Openrouter is a tiny blip

imjonse 8mo ago

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.

wasmainiac 8mo ago

> 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.

throwaway2037 8mo ago
> 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.
- m000 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - tredre3 8mo ago
    Your comment applies equally well to aspiring actors. The similarity between actors and influencers is more than superficial.

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benreesman 8mo ago

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.

Kiro 8mo ago

> We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. Why this insinuation? The project went massively viral and was even covered in my local newspaper. I don't see any reason to doubt those numbers.

LtWorf 8mo ago
As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?
- Kiro 8mo ago
  Yeah, the small local newspaper for my town of 30k is a paid shill for OpenClaw. Amazing comment.

throw444420394 8mo ago

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.

philipallstar 8mo ago
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.

FreeRadical 8mo ago

Read his backstory. He’s a high quality software engineer by background.

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BryantD 8mo ago

The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?

nb777 8mo ago

No need to be jealous. If you'd have watched some of the interviews of this guy then you'd know that he's not vibe coding.

column 8mo ago

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.

catwell 8mo ago

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.

debugnik 8mo ago
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.
- planb 8mo ago
  ClawHub isn't even useful. You can just point tell your OpenClaw agent you want it to do, and it will implement it. No need to rely on someone else's code^H^H^H^H textual descriptions of how to do talk to service xzy.
deanc 8mo ago
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.
- stitched2gethr 8mo ago
  I think that's partly the point. This is the tool that everyone wanted but couldn't quite describe. Not saying he's a genius, but he was the first to will it into existence.

citizenpaul 8mo ago

HN Really hates understanding business. All these comments, yet no one has gotten the answer right. OpenAI bought marketing and now someone else cannot buy openclaw and lock out Openai revenue from a project that is gaining momentum. There are a many of these business moves that seem like nonsense. 1. Bought for marketing. 2. Adversarial hire. ie hire highly skilled people before your competitors can even if you don't have anything for them do to. Yet... 3. Acqu-hire. Buy a company when you really just want some of the staff. 4. Buy Customers. You don't care about the product and intend to migrate their customers to your system. 5. Buy competition before its a threat.

thorio 8mo ago

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.

wanderingmind 8mo ago

Whenever technically more capable folks diss the growth of a non technical person into bigger roles, I'm obligated to post this Steve Jobs video being asked about Java. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=6

eviks 8mo ago

> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". It doesn't? You'd need to know the odds for the tell. Like how many incompetent grifters are there, how many of them become hugely successful?

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nedt 8mo ago

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.

seanoreillyza 8mo ago

Do good or at least useful work in public and you'd be surprised at what can happen.

seydor 8mo ago

I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt

bjourne 8mo ago

Props for admitting jealousy and for being honest! I often feel the same way when fixing bugs in others code.

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cgfjtynzdrfht 8mo ago

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anilakar 8mo ago

> 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.

imtringued 8mo ago

It's also from a guy who rebranded three times (Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw) in a row and this is technically his fourth rebrand.

gadders 8mo ago

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.

21asdffdsa12 8mo ago

One day Atlas may shrug, but not today, atlast..

PurpleRamen 8mo ago

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.

sauercrowd 8mo ago

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.

jonmc12 8mo ago
Also surprised; building something people want and proving it is the unlock. HN first principle since the beginning.

girvo 8mo ago

> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success" Kids and young people have known this forever at this point. Sadly.

elAhmo 8mo ago

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.

b3lvedere 8mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AKKmqGvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_95AKKmqGvE Semantics and grammar joke aside.. there are not many workers remembered in history. Only the so-called absolute greatest, meanest, etc are remembered. Nobody remembers the people who worked on the pyramid, but everyone knows some Farao. In this case they hired someone who has 'mastered' the use of their own tool(s). Like if Home Depot hired a guy who has almost perfect knowledge of each and every tool in their own portfolio. I'm not really sure if i want to be that guy.

ryanar 8mo ago

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.

bhaak 8mo ago
If you just commit AI generated code without even looking at it it doesn't matter how many years of engineering experience you have.

blueblazin 8mo ago

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?

alberto467 8mo ago

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.

antfarm 8mo ago

>We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks >We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. And we have a company whose product should adhere to the highest security standards possible, hiring this guy.

qmr 8mo ago

> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Well duh. I thought that was well understood. The other option is having well-to-do parents a la Musk or Gates. Have you tried that?

powerapple 8mo ago

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.

nasmorn 8mo ago

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.

koe123 8mo ago

In my view this is just an aquihire to get a headline and take ownership over this trend. Yet another pivot to build hype.

123malware321 8mo ago

dont be jealous. working for some evil corporate is soulsucking for most humans. Only few thrive in such environments. most will try to get quick $$ and exit before they feel completely dead inside.

swiftcoder 8mo ago

> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". I'm pretty sure that's meant to be the general lesson of the last 20 years or so in Silicon Valley, but it's just survivorship bias in action. You don't hear a whole lot about the quietly successful engineers who work a 9-till-5 and then go home to see their wife and kids. But you do constantly hear about the folks who made it big YOLO'ing their career and finances on the latest a startup/memecoin/vibecoded app...

morningsam 8mo ago
Exactly. This whole thing just seems like a repeat of Flappy Bird to me. What was the "lesson" of Flappy Bird for game developers? That you should make very small, very simple games? How has that worked out for the vast majority of copycats who tried? The truth is there isn't any lesson, other than "sometimes people play the lottery, get lucky and win". Most people who play won't, though.

DivingForGold 8mo ago

If all the above is true, why didn't Sam & Co just replicate his product and offer their own improved version - - with security incorporated within ?

ass22 8mo ago
Because he wanted to say "Take that" To anthropic who forced Pete to change the name of the product.

Aperocky 8mo ago

Vibe coding is just a tool - same with programming languages and compilers. The product being useful and well received by user and market is still the ultimate test. Whether something is vibe coded or not does not matter.

chvid 8mo ago

Maybe think of this as a hiring of a marketer and tech influencer. And someone with the chops to create a viral product.

jimmydoe 8mo ago
Exactly. If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.

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haebom 8mo ago

Would you like to have it removed? https://github.com/oswarld/openshears https://github.com/oswarld/openshears

hmokiguess 8mo ago

I think you’re conflating things. You probably are not jealous but rather frustrated and coming from a point of a false dichotomy trying to equal your position to his. If you were to stop and actually compare your lives you would likely find very different humans. It’s easy to fall into this trap sometimes, don’t let it get into your head. Be grateful for being you and enjoy what life has to offer you instead.

Danidada 8mo ago

This is such a strange take to be the top comment of “hacker” news. Why are we shaming someone who “hacked” something together and made it open source?

motbus3 8mo ago

I think it is unfortunate that this is happening. After all the mishaps and wrongdoings I don't want see anyone joining openai

aerhardt 8mo ago

> We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. This is isn’t right. He says very clearly in the recent Lex Fridman podcast that he looks at critical code (ex: database code). He said he doesn’t look at things like Tailwind code.

turtlebro 8mo ago

Ugh. Have we all forgotten that jealousy is the absolute opposite of a good virtue. Why does this get upvoted? Hacker News in a truly despicable state these days when this is what bubbles to the top. It saddens me to see that all the good people here have left or stopped participating. When we hear how rotten social media is, this also includes HN.

thecupisblue 8mo ago

It's not about the code, it's about the vibe. Also, Peter is quite well known in the dev circles, and especially in mobile development communities for his work on PSPDFKit. It is not like he's some unknown developer that just blew up - he owned a dev tooling company for over 10+ years, contributed a lot to the community and is a great dev.

conradev 8mo ago

Peter has been prolific and talented long before AI tools. I became familiar with his work a decade ago: https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView People seem to think that because we all have the same tools and because they’re increasingly agentic, that the person wielding the tool has become less relevant, or that the code itself has become less relevant. That is just not the case, at least yet, and Peter is applying a decade plus of entrepreneurial and engineering experience.

BoggleFiend 8mo ago
He was recently interviewed on Pragmatic Engineer, a podcast whose guests almost always have very impressive technical careers (the episode before him was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the VP of Data and Analytics at AWS and the episode after him is Brady Gooch, the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM) I agree that summarizing Peter as a "vibe coder" is unfair and disingenuous. The podcast paints his career as being interesting because we went from an impressive software developer, to an entrepreneur, to taking a significant break, to kind of obsessively creating Clawdbot. Worth a listen https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-cl...

danmaz74 8mo ago

> vibecoded without reading any of the code Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?

Aurornis 8mo ago

> Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company I think the whole OpenClaw arc has been fun to follow, but this sudden turn away from OpenClaw and toward the author as a new micro-celebrity that ended with OpenClaw being sidelined to a foundation was not what I saw coming. Congrats to Pete for getting such an amazing job out of this, but it does feel strange that only a few days ago he was doing the podcast circuit and telling interviewers he has no interest in joining AI labs. I don’t think this story arc should be seen as something replicable. Many have been trying to do the same thing lately: Hyping their software across social media and even podcasts while trying to turn it into cash. Steve Yegge is the example that comes to mind with his desperate attempts to scare developers into using his Gas Town (telling devs “dude you’re going to get fired” if they don’t start using his orchestration thing). The best he got out of it was a $300K crypto pump and dump scam and a rapidly dropping reputation as a result. Individuals who start popular movements have always been targets for hiring at energetic companies. In the past the situation has been reversed, though: Remember when the homebrew creator was rejected from Google because he didn’t pass the coding interview? (Note he later acquiesced to say that Google made the right call at the time). That time, the internet was outraged that he was not hired, even though that would have likely meant the end of homebrew. I do think we’ll be seeing a lot of copycat attempts and associated spam promoting them (here on HN, too, sadly) much like how when people see someone get success on YouTube or TikTok you see thousands of copycats pop up that go nowhere. The people who try to copycat their way into this type of success are going to discover that it’s not as easy as it looks.

shin_lao 8mo ago

See that as winning the "startup lottery", that doesn't mean what he did is rational or smart, he just had a great outcome. In trading it's the same, you can make stupid bets and make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're good trader. Nothing to conclude from this, this kind of hype-fueled outcome has always been a part of life.

mvkel 8mo ago

This should be a wake up call. A product's value is not a function of its code elegance. Nobody who matters notices the code, or cares. This is hugely inspiring to the most lazy+clever engineers, because it frees up so many thinking calories. Instead of trying to perfectly choreograph every bit of architecture to optimize for 1M concurrent users, you can spend 0.1 of the time and get things out the door, where you learn if spending even a minute of your time was worth it. Even better, when you realize tech debt is something that never needs to be paid down, you can focus all your energy on evolving your thinking patterns, not being bogged down in refactoring things that you've spiritually moved on from. An engineer's time is so precious; it needs to be spent thinking, not coding.

runjake 8mo ago

> We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks > We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. Peter was pretty open about all of this. He doesn't hide the fact. It was a personal hack that took off and went viral. > We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. My guess, from his unwillingness to take the free pile of cash from the bags.fm grift, is that this in unlikely. I don't know that I would've been able to make the same decision. > Then after a bunch of podcasts and interviews, this person gets hired by a big tech company. Would you hire someone who never read any if the code that they've developed? Well, this is what happened here. Yes, I'd hire him. He's imaginative and productive and ships and documents things. I can fix the code auditing problem. > In this timeline, I'm not sure I find anything inspiring here. Okay? > It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success". Peter has been in the trenches for years and years, shipped and sold. He's written and released many useful tools over the years. Again, this was a project of personal love that went viral. This is not an "overnight success" situation. > So am I jealous, yes because this timeline makes no sense as a software engineer. But am I happy for the guy, yeah I also want to make lots of money someday. Write and release many, many useful tools. Form a community and share what you're building and your chances will greatly increase?

elwatto 8mo ago

nah. focus on building cool things people want.

j45 8mo ago

He didn't create or release something as finished. He built something and shared it. People took liberties with it. It's not about getting viral/lucky... it's about enjoying experimenting and learning. Money follows your unique impact and imprint in these kinds of cases.

mempko 8mo ago

Don't forget he also had Sam Altman's phone number. Do you any of you have his number? Also before he did all this he was semi retired for 5 years because of a successful exit. So for anyone thinking they can replicate this ask... 1. Are you already rich? Do you have cash in the bank to vibecode a project fulltime for many months just for fun? 2. Do you have Sam Altman's (or similar) number?

edstarch 8mo ago

Such is life in the attention economy.

h14h 8mo ago

OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model providers have created tools (the LLMs) with unprecedented new capabilities. The key problems are a) these new tools have weird limitations that make them hard to deploy effectively, and b) these tools are so fundamentally new that creating useful products out of them is an exercise in discovery and requires incredibly novel, forward-thinking vision. Pete, more than anyone in the OSS community IMO, exemplifies both of these qualities. He is living very much on the bleeding edge, so yes, the 10s of projects he's shipped faster than most devs can ship 1 are not as polished as if he'd created them by hand. But he's been pushing the envelope in ways that few, if any, are, and I'd argue that OpenClaw is much more the result of Pete living on that edge and understanding the trade-offs of these tools better than just about anyone. Personally, I'm much more jealous of the fact that Pete has already had a successful exit under his belt and had the freedom to explore & learn these tools to the fullest. There is definitely a degree of luck involved with the degree to which OpenClaw took off, but that Pete discovered it is 100% earned IMO.

sathish316 8mo ago

Peter clarified “I don’t read code” part in Lex Fridman interview - he said “I don’t read the boring parts of the code” that are about data transformation or writing to/reading from databases. He distinguished between what he calls “Agentic Engineering” and “Vibe coding”, and claimed majority of the time he is not just Vibe coding. He has 80,000+ GitHub contributions in a year across 50+ projects. I’m not sure how he averages 200 commits per day by just looking at diffs from a terminal, but it’s just Superhuman - https://github.com/steipete https://github.com/steipete

bluerooibos 8mo ago

I've seen the same result play out a few times on LinkedIn - random person studying for an MS in CS or AI, blogs and posts about stuff they're vibe coding with Lovable or whatever, builds a decent following, and then, from tagging various AI-related firms, lands a job at one of them. The field has kind of been like this for a while - people with portfolios of proven work done, showcasing yourself and your personality via blogs or vlogs makes you sort of a known quantity, versus someone with just a CV and a LinkedIn page. This is yet another example of an area where extroverts have an advantage. You could be 10x the engineer that the creator of OpenClaw is, but that's irrelevant in this timeline if nobody has ever heard of you.

neop1x 8mo ago

Good for him! But it is possible he won't stay there for a long time. Like Geohot at Apple. There is a difference between working on a fun project which you completely control and being under a constant pressure and having to follow constrains and requirements set by managers in a corporation.

jstummbillig 8mo ago

You could always get, mh, lucky. That is the most common startup exit plan: Finding someone who pays for half a business or an idea. Now it happens more quickly. Everything does. But that path was never about writing good code.

svnt 8mo ago

Jealousy is exactly the reaction they are hoping to trigger: use our tools, build something popular, get paid out. What better marketing spend than buying this project.

skeptic_ai 8mo ago

I was jealous too until I realized this is just an ad for OpenAI. They want to show you can vibe code an app and actually become a millionaire. What better way to show than actually do it? Well, here you have it, a low effort to wire up a few tools together with spaghetti gen ai and he’s millionaire in a few months. Ok, I might be mean by saying no effort, I actually don’t know. But I know vibe coding won’t work for more than a few weeks. Also I think this bot is just a connector to multiple open source libraries that connect to WhatsApp and other services. This is the best ad to sell AI: you can be millionaire too if you use our ChatGPT to vibe code stuff. I think it will get a negative reaction in a few weeks when the dust settles as technical people realize it’s an ad. Note: he might be an amazing developer but the ad still stands. Edit: from Gemini: Publicly Embarrassing Anthropic: The timing is brutal. Anthropic’s legal team forcing a name change (from "Clawdbot" to "Moltbot" to "OpenClaw") alienated the very developer who was driving millions of users to their model. OpenAI swooping in to hire him days later frames Anthropic as "corporate lawyers" and OpenAI as "friends of the builders." It’s a perfect narrative victory.

secbear 8mo ago

I feel similar... OpenClaw has lots of vulnerabilities, and it's very messy, but it also brought self-hosted cron-based agentic workflows to your favorite messaging channel (iMessage, telegram, slack, WhatsApp, etc.), which shouldn't be overlooked

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

> 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. I have a feeling that OpenAI and Anthropic both use AI to code a lot more than we think, we definitely know and hear about it at Anthropic, I havent heard it a lot at OpenAI, but it would not surprise me. I think you 100% can "vibe code" correctly. I would argue, with the hours you save coding by hand, and debugging code, etc you should 100% read the code the AI generates. It takes little effort to have the model rewrite it to be easier to read for humans. The whole "we will rewrite it later" mentality that never comes to pass is actually possible with AI, but its one prompt away.

chillacy 8mo ago
Boris has been very open about the 100% AI code writing rate and my own experience matches. If you have a typescript or common codebase, once you set your processes up correctly (you have tests / verification, you have a CLAUDE or AGENTS.md that you always add learnings to, you add skill files as you find repeatable tasks, you have automated code review), its not hard to achieve this. Then the human touch points become coming up with what to build, reviewing the eng plans of the AI, and increasingly light code review of the underlying code, focusing on overall architectural decisions and only occasionally intervening to clean things up (again with AI)
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  I'm aware I've been building my own alternative to Beads for weeks now. the instructions.md file and something like Beads is epic. https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails I didnt like how married to git hooks beads was, so I made my own thats primarily a SQLite workhorse. Been using it just the same as I have used Beads, works just as good, drastically less code. I added a concept called "gates" to stop the AI model from just closing tasks without any testing or validation (human or otherwise) because it was another pain point for me with Beads. I fully sync the issues to GitHub to boot. https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues Works both ways, to GitHub, from GitHub. When you claim a task, its supposed to update on GitHub too (though looking at the last one I claimed, doesnt seem to be 100% foolproof yet).

tom_m 8mo ago

I mean some might say that's like joining a sinking ship. Of course one man's trash is another man's treasure. To each their own. Hiring in tech has been broken for many many years at this point. There's so much noise and only more noise coming now with AI. To be completely honest it's entire random from my end when hiring. We can't review every application that comes in. It's just impossible. We do weed out some of the spam of course and do get to real people that actually fit the requirements, but there's so many other talented people who would easily fit the role that simple get buried under applications. It's depressing from all sides here. No one should think that they aren't any good or did something wrong or didn't network enough... because the unfortunate truth is that getting a job in tech is a lottery. Something many don't want to admit.

ass22 8mo ago
Im working on a project to change this. Funny that you mention 'real people'. There are a number of components that sit at the core of what Im building - it should allow you to have the time and reach to vet more (100% verified) candidates than you ever could before. I also want to reduce the explicit costs of hiring so that firms can hire more people.

buschleague 8mo ago

This isn't a surprise at all. I sat down with the dev team at OpenAI during dev day last year and the biggest shocker to me: these "kids" are over here vibe coding the whole damn thing.

figassis 8mo ago

You don't get hired for any of that. OpenAI did not hire him because he went viral. Virality brought something interesting to OpenAI's attention. And they thought they could use this product idea/vision/execution, GTM strategy, whatever, and because it didn't seem like OAI had anyone on their team capable of this, they hired him. Simple as that. Don't feel jealous, trying to replicate won't work, he did not know he'd be hired, he built something that he found interesting, and then realized it would be interesting to a lot more people. The way to reach success is to either be strategically consistent in a way that maximizes luck surface area but does not depend on it, or to be unexpectedly lucky. The latter is gambling, People win the lottery regularly, does not mean you should make that your mission. Be comfortable with not being the one to hit gold. And yes, it's ok to be jealous. Take a moment and then go back and enjoy the rest of your life. Finally, there are a lot of companies that would likely hire you, hoping to hit gold. But you are likely filtering them out because they're not tech/large/startupy enough for you. These companies are wondering what they need to attract talent like you.

re5i5tor 8mo ago

I shared a lot of these uninformed (speaking only for myself) opinions, but have a lot more respect for Peter after listening to his recent 3hr interview with Lex Fridman. I came away liking and respecting.

deleted 8mo ago

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jv22222 8mo ago

The billion dollar homepage.

NuclearPM 8mo ago

What the heck is “softwares”?