Hacker News

I’m joining OpenAI

2026-02-1521:5414491131steipete.me

I'm joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.

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• 3 min read

tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.

The last month was a whirlwind, never would I have expected that my playground project would create such waves. The internet got weird again, and it’s been incredibly fun to see how my work inspired so many people around the world.

There’s an endless array of possibilities that opened up for me, countless people trying to push me into various directions, giving me advice, asking how they can invest or what I will do. Saying it’s overwhelming is an understatement.

When I started exploring AI, my goal was to have fun and inspire people. And here we are, the lobster is taking over the world. My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research.

Yes, I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it’s not really exciting for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.

I spent last week in San Francisco talking with the major labs, getting access to people and unreleased research, and it’s been inspiring on all fronts. I want to thank all the folks I talked to this week and am thankful for the opportunities.

It’s always been important to me that OpenClaw stays open source and given the freedom to flourish. Ultimately, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach. The more I talked with the people there, the clearer it became that we both share the same vision.

The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure I’m working on making it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data, with the goal of supporting even more models and companies.

Personally I’m super excited to join OpenAI, be part of the frontier of AI research and development, and continue building with all of you.

The claw is the law.

ClawCon


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Comments

  • By tabs_or_spaces 2026-02-166:07100 reply

    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.

    • By erikbye 2026-02-166:3343 reply

      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.

      • By latexr 2026-02-168:3219 reply

        > you get hired for your proven ability to (…)

        No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)

        The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.

        https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

        • By Balinares 2026-02-1612:293 reply

          Oh, Julius. Haven't we all met a Julius.

          Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent.

          We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load.

          The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server.

          That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO.

          Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first.

          The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually.

          So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years.

          So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being.

          This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present.

          A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well.

          Our eyes met.

          And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."

          • By ddevnyc 2026-02-1617:49

            I've met countless Juliuses over the years. I kept track of the companies, and the Juliuses. My biggest revelation is that every company that was being in some substantial capacity led by a Julius (either at C level, VP, or high up in management) ended up one of two ways:

            1. Shut down or shutting down (e.g. team reduced by > 50% since I've been there)

            2. Julius removed, endlessly seeking work, keeps getting fired, and can't find a place to call home

            The meteoric rise of the Julius is an exception - sooner or later their lucky streak ends and they face the cliff of adversity, towering above them with no way to climb it - no skills to help him actually do it.

          • By crashprone 2026-02-1613:19

            This story made my day, thanks!

          • By 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 2026-02-1617:40

            I mean, maybe he was a revolutionary. One could describe what Vercel is selling as some kind of "wget optimizer" as well

        • By gnfargbl 2026-02-169:053 reply

          In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all.

          I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.

          • By wolfi1 2026-02-1611:15

            oh man, I have met several Juliuses. one of them was my boss till he made an error as similar to the one the original Julius made, but unfortunately too late I had to leave the company earlier he made my life hell. now he is at another company, as long as he is at this company I won't apply there, if they hire him they have no place for me

          • By coldtea 2026-02-1611:401 reply

            No end of Juliuses. And they're not even the worst type you can meet at a software company.

            • By rozap 2026-02-1616:542 reply

              There are so many. I think if you haven't met a Julius, chances are you are Julius..

          • By rustystump 2026-02-169:327 reply

            I have met armies of julius at all levels. Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you.

            It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.

            • By JackFr 2026-02-1611:441 reply

              > The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing.

              And generational wealth and serious political power.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr.

            • By ptero 2026-02-1611:391 reply

              Humans are social animals and good social skills is a major benefit almost everywhere, including at work. This does not make most people juliuses.

            • By direwolf20 2026-02-169:362 reply

              80% of people you meet are communicating to your customers that the server doesn't have an IP address for security reasons?

            • By closewith 2026-02-1612:221 reply

              > Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you.

              > Industry is no different.

              Based on these comments, maybe some self-reflection is in order, as it seems from the 80% comment that what you mean is that 80% of people are able to adequately communicate.

            • By shabatar 2026-02-1621:061 reply

              The question is how does one become julius

            • By tracerbulletx 2026-02-1620:00

              And yet this thread is completely full of Frank Grimes.

            • By nuancebydefault 2026-02-1619:211 reply

              That number feels off by a lot to me. I think i can say i'm quite good at socializing, quite above average when comparing to people I meet and work with. I'd rate my engineering skills about average level and i have a firm dislike of fraud and of people acting to be better/smarter/faster than they really are. In my career I've come across managers of the julius type, as well of the narcissistic type, even a sociopath. I would estimate 10 to 20 percent of people are of the Julius type.

        • By skeledrew 2026-02-169:342 reply

          > perceived ability

          In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.

          • By PurpleRamen 2026-02-1610:473 reply

            Yet, people are still asking for the usability of OpenClaw outside of marketing. It's a bit unclear how much of a "killer app" it really is, and how much is just burning money for the lulz and Bot RP. I personally also got the impression many people had their first AI-gateway experience with OpenClaw, and don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now, but is located in the expensive LLMs which OpenClaw is using, not in OpenClaw itself. I've seen people thinking that OpenClaw is actually the AI.

            • By skeledrew 2026-02-1616:111 reply

              > don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now

              Hugely underestimated comment. That's pretty much the entire point here. Many people didn't know something with these capabilities was already possible. Or some - like me - knew of the potential, but couldn't be bothered/didn't have the time to put the bits together in a satisfactory flow (I'm currently exploring and building on nanobot[0], which is directly inspired by OpenClaw; didn't touch OC because it's in JS and I'm a Python person). Everything came together really well, which is why it's a "killer app". And now the dam has burst there will be customized takes on the concept all over the place (I'm also aware of a Rust "port", Moltis[1]), taking the idea to next levels.

              [0] https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot [1] https://github.com/moltis-org/moltis

            • By sho_hn 2026-02-1611:252 reply

              Doesn't really matter. As always it's integration that makes a product.

              Talking to bots on Telegram isn't new.

              Running agentic loops isn't new.

              Giving AI credentials and having it interface with APIs isn't new.

              Triggering AI jobs from external event queues isn't new.

              Parking state between AI jobs in temp files isn't new.

              Putting all together in one product and marketing it to the right audience? New.

              • By PurpleRamen 2026-02-1611:361 reply

                But novelty doesn't make a killer app. When outside of marketing and gateway-experience, there are still that many open questions, then maybe it's a valid claim to call it perception instead of substance.

                At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.

              • By Fr0styMatt88 2026-02-170:15

                Seems exactly like that whole “Dropbox vs setting up an FTP server” thing again.

            • By GreenWatermelon 2026-02-1711:51

              Oh otsit's a Killer app alright. One that might kill you personally. And me. And everyone.

        • By eager_learner 2026-02-1612:011 reply

          to--> latexr: Thank you for the link to Polum's essay in juliusosis. It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. Probably because modern schooling encourages this.

          I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.

          • By josteink 2026-02-176:521 reply

            > It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight.

            It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

            I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction.

            A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works.

            It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility.

            The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved.

            If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not.

            Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)

            • By latexr 2026-02-179:36

              > I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

              You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind

              But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little.

              There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.

        • By quietbritishjim 2026-02-1615:53

          I think you're right but you've been a bit pedantic about the parent comment. They sloppily said that delivering business value gets you hired, when in reality the appearance of that may do. But I think we all understood their main thrust was to disagree with the comment before them about coding ability, and the point is that this doesn't always correlate with business value.

          I did enjoy your link though.

        • By chungus 2026-02-1615:461 reply

          My imposter syndrome is essentially fear of being julius.

          • By Rooster61 2026-02-1615:57

            90% of software engineers have a fear of being Julius

        • By dannyw 2026-02-1614:07

          Your comment and the article expanded my world view a little bit. Thank you.

        • By skrlet13 2026-02-2315:05

          Julius seems like a inept IT worker, but well-meaning person. Someone who would cheer you up to help.

          (gen)AI is not even a person. And you have to pay for it, in some way

        • By mrugge 2026-02-1623:031 reply

          The world is full of Juliuses. And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. Worth considering this before dismissing someone as yet another Julius. Oh and everything doesn't suck.

          • By latexr 2026-02-1710:02

            > And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted.

            No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual.

            > Oh and everything doesn't suck.

            I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.

        • By fsniper 2026-02-1612:54

          I haven't seen that before. But it was really hard get to the end. Not because it's bad written or so, on the contrary is a very good piece. However the feeling is unfathomable. I hate Julius'es. More so I hate the managers blinded by Julius'es.

        • By Xmd5a 2026-02-1613:09

          > Pour celleux qui ne connaissent pas l’informatique

          https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cites-2020-2-page-137?lang=fr

        • By 3form 2026-02-1613:311 reply

          How about none of the above, but hired because of wanting OpenClaw?

          • By bjt 2026-02-1617:021 reply

            There's OpenClaw the codebase, and there's OpenClaw the community. They could build the same program very easily (as evidenced by the number of clones out there already). That part's not worth paying much for. But redirecting the whole enthusiast community around it? That's worth a lot.

            • By 3form 2026-02-1620:31

              Exactly. My point is that it might not be about the guy.

        • By cekanoni 2026-02-1616:52

          This is if not the best article i have read recently. Julius ...

        • By alpineman 2026-02-169:31

          Everything is perception though. You are looking at this with your own perception, biases, and heuristics just like everyone else. There is no 'right' way to hire.

        • By nickzelei 2026-02-1616:46

          Wow, that blog post really gave me pause and has stuck in my head for the last hour or so.

        • By johnthescott 2026-02-1723:22

          ask to view their code. any trivial detail about their code should be answered quickly and coherently, assuming they wrote the code.

          in a startup give me unruly pirates over obedient sailors (sj).

        • By PlatoIsADisease 2026-02-1613:04

          Great article until the end when they talked about AI.

        • By LoganDark 2026-02-1616:54

          Julius sounds like a sociopath. Sociopaths have no empathy/morals, so they can confidently lie all day and still be perfectly fulfilled; and some of them can be very excellent at social manipulation. This level of confidence in all things, including complete bullshitting, and constantly climbing the corporate ladder for huge payoffs, is not too uncommon among them.

          IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.

        • By raverbashing 2026-02-1610:021 reply

          Talk about going all the way to write the story and seeing the point go by

          Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius

          You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood

          Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels

          • By Balinares 2026-02-1612:331 reply

            Nah. Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses. Because there will be other disastrous consequences to their bad decision making processes.

            • By raverbashing 2026-02-1613:06

              > Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses.

              Good luck with that

      • By ho_schi 2026-02-169:335 reply

        I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.

        The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.

            Restart braking to brake because our code failed.
        Or.

            One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!
        After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.

            But I’m only programming a text viewer.
        Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.

        • By class3shock 2026-02-1611:451 reply

          For Airbus, Boeing, and others the cost of failure is disproportionately high. Just look at how you consider Boeing despite that 99.99...% of their software and hardware work flawlessly. They will be known for the 737 Max failure for decades.

          When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.

          It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.

          • By mustyoshi 2026-02-1613:472 reply

            But realistically, I just had 2 flights last month, checking what model of aircraft I was on didn't even cross my mind. I survived both flights btw.

            • By ron_woods 2026-02-1720:49

              Me to until the 737 Max crashes. Now, I will go out of my way(inconvenience) to avoid the Max line. I guess it gives me the illusion of control.

            • By class3shock 2026-02-1721:20

              My point was only that you may not have checked but you know about the 737 Max. Do you know about software failures from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. killing someone? They certainly have but it doesn't get the same press.

        • By ghoblin 2026-02-1610:152 reply

          There are only so many safety-first companies and products. The vast majority of the economy isn't optimizing for safety

          • By tshaddox 2026-02-1712:34

            Could it be that the only large safety-first companies are the ones forced by law (either proactively, or due to reliable legal accountability if things go wrong) to be safety-first?

          • By swiftcoder 2026-02-1612:581 reply

            > There are only so many safety-first companies and products

            There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.

            Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.

            Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.

            Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.

            And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment

            • By ghoblin 2026-02-1614:121 reply

              There’s a difference between "safety matters" and “safety is the primary constraint". Most companies manage risk to an acceptable level while optimizing for speed and cost. Aerospace companies optimize for minimizing catastrophic failure, even at extreme expense. Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently. The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing. And because the majority of economic activity sits in that lower-criticality category, it would not be surprising if highly specialized, safety-critical human software engineering becomes more of a niche, while much of routine software development becomes increasingly automated or commoditized.

        • By eecc 2026-02-1610:173 reply

          OT: it's not the first time I see this grammatical mistake: "didn’t trained". Is it some accepted regional variation?

          • By illichosky 2026-02-1610:30

            I think he is a non-native speaker, like me. I also do this mistake very often and 'didn't train' is a bit counter-intuitive - at least for me.

          • By cookiengineer 2026-02-1611:262 reply

            I think that happens when as a German you're used to using the Plusquamperfekt which is a somewhat unique tense that's allowed to be used in all past tenses.

            It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.

            Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.

            Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?

            [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plusquamperfekt

            • By leononame 2026-02-187:55

              English has present perfect, and past perfect. E.g. "I have walked" and "I had walked", both tenses are participated (ie "walked" instead of "walk"). These two are similar to the German Perfekt and Plusquamperfekt which are also participated.

              The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.

            • By saidnooneever 2026-02-177:16

              id think its germanic, dutch have it too

          • By ho_schi 2026-02-1612:58

            Thank you! I assume “didn’t train” is correct. Probably my favorite mistake! I like it when people point out mistakes, give me corrections, and explain why. The reason is crucial.

            Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sense when ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. It makes up options for git[1] and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.

            Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.

            [1] Considering that man pages exist, it shows how useless their harmful crawlers are.

        • By pembrook 2026-02-1610:15

          We're not talking about Airbus or centuries old commodified industrial companies. Airbus sells airplanes, not AI software tools.

          But if you did build a core innovation in aerospace that went viral I'm sure Airbus would be interested in hiring you.

          The salary would be 3K per month. And lunch coupons to buy a ham baguette.

        • By rafaelmn 2026-02-169:361 reply

          Airbus pays like shit probably. Just going off the stuff I've read about Boeing.

      • By Balinares 2026-02-1611:034 reply

        I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.

        "Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.

        (Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)

        • By RamblingCTO 2026-02-1611:06

          Both can be true: people who deliver products based on vision and all are very much needed and cracked devs who excel in technical details as well. Peter and you are of these respective groups then.

        • By bleudeballe 2026-02-1619:03

          The Youtube mobile app is a nightmare to use, and has been for months (desktop is working quite well but I am using my phone 95% of the time). Reopening a short shows me a few frames of the next video before freezing, shorts die on second play constantly, history crashes because of shorts, changing to videos brings them back but navigating to shorts crashes again.

          This has been reliably going on for at least 6+ months, I thought shorts was a big priority for them, but the UX is and remains horrible.

        • By Aperocky 2026-02-1618:57

          This is where the debate has another axis - when.

          Quality matters, delivery speed matters, shipping also matters, where it matters and when it matters is much harder to get right. But it's also self correcting - if you don't, the project or business die - you can only get it wrong for so much or for so long.

          To only discuss on one axis is presumably why GNU Hurd have never shipped or how claude-c-compiler doesn't compile hello world.

        • By rjsw 2026-02-1612:281 reply

          You still need a few people high enough up in a company who think that quality does matter to be able to get the job to fix things.

          • By Balinares 2026-02-1612:52

            That will happen, in the lucky cases, when someone high enough up with basic reasoning skills looks at support costs and time spent fixing bugs versus feature release velocity and sales income.

      • By Fervicus 2026-02-169:591 reply

        > If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

        Hard disagree. I foresee the opposite being true. I think the ability to understand and write secure, well optimized, performant code will become more and more niche and highly desired in order to fix the mess the vibe coders are going to leave behind.

        • By Urahandystar 2026-02-1613:331 reply

          And the cheapest way to distribute that to everyone will be via AI coding.

          • By Fervicus 2026-02-1614:461 reply

            If AI becomes good at doing that and fixing bugs, then sure. But there is no evidence pointing towards that as of now. Mostly only slop.

            • By spogbiper 2026-02-1615:311 reply

              this is such a weird take to me. every piece of evidence I've seen shows that AI is quickly becoming better at writing code, debugging, finding security issues. my own experience, benchmarks, studies, new articles.. everything points to progress

      • By pnt12 2026-02-169:031 reply

        Fully disagree.

        There's lots of people that won't care about the code: executives, managers, customers etc. If the engineers don't care either, then who cares?

        If we compare with big food companies, that's like their food formula. No one thinks it's useless - it's the source code for the product they sell. Yet nowadays we get so many engineers distancing themselves away from the code, like the software formula doesn't matter.

        There are diminishing returns, but overall good code goes hand in hand with good products, it's just a different side of it.

        • By swat535 2026-02-1615:361 reply

          Based on the interview format these days, I beg to differ.

          If this were true, we wouldn't be studying Leet code and inverting binary trees to get a job.

          I guess the lesson here is that unless you have a direct line with upper management to skip the line, you'll be stuck grinding algorithms for the rest of your life.

          • By pphysch 2026-02-1618:03

            Leet code interviews are in the spirit of filtering out charlatans who misrepresent having even basic programming fundamentals. Many interviewers take it too far, but the original motivation is essential to saving time in the hiring process. I was instantly converted after participating in the full hiring process for a junior dev, which didn't properly filter for programming skill.

            Big companies may have separate hiring SWE departments where the initial interviewers don't even know what team or role you may land in, so they have to resort to something...

      • By Flere-Imsaho 2026-02-167:544 reply

        I was nodding my head agreeing with you but then remembered John Carmack, who seems to deliver both... He takes great pride in writing ground breaking code, for industry defining products.

        We should all try and be more like John Carmack.

        • By bugthe0ry 2026-02-168:47

          The man is on a different level, cognitively speaking. That's like asking sprinters to "just be more like Usain Bolt". Some people are just built different. Carmack is one of them.

        • By js8 2026-02-168:01

          I admire the guy but he spends like 12 hours a day doing just that and his code is full of tricks, it's debatable as a paragon of quality. I don't think it's for everyone, to be Carmack, nor it should be; diversity is important.

        • By libertine 2026-02-1610:49

          Another detail is that his groundbreaking code was great part of made some of the products - I'm thinking of Doom.

          It wasn't just for the sake of quality and best practices, it defined and had an impact on the product experience.

          Like Doom probably wouldn't have been as successful if it was any other way.

        • By ljm 2026-02-1620:27

          I argue we shouldn't, because if everyone is like Carmack then no one is.

          And only people on the older end of the spectrum have seen Carmack working in his element back in the day.

          The things I want people to take from a guy like John Carmack, or Jon Blow, or Lukas Pope, or Ron Gilbert, or Tim Schafer, or Warren Spector, or Sam Lake, or David Cage god forbid...is pure curiosity and pushing the boundaries to make that real.

          In every case there is a mix of a deep and unusual urge to make an idea happen with an affinity towards the technicality of it.

          I bring Sam Lake into this because nobody has blended FMV with gameplay the way Remedy have and pushed the boundary on it.

      • By mdavid626 2026-02-166:531 reply

        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.

        • By onion2k 2026-02-167:05

          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.

      • By johnebgd 2026-02-166:421 reply

        I’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.

        • By erikbye 2026-02-166:48

          Right. Shopify apps, too, is a gold mine.

      • By yobbo 2026-02-168:111 reply

        He's not hired to code. He has taste for "what works" in these types of things. They want him to apply that taste - maybe making new services or fixing old.

      • By democracy 2026-02-167:011 reply

        I like your optimism but no - you are still hired via "excels at hackerrank", every big tech company first interview is exactly this, no matter how many projects your delivered and how useful you are/were at you previous job.

        • By lmpdev 2026-02-169:362 reply

          This seems to be largely an American phenomenon

          In more minor markets like Europe/Australia it seems to be a lot less leetcode and a lot more (1) experience (2) degree (3) actual interview performance

          • By sjzhzhz 2026-02-1616:00

            This is more so because the US companies have been flooded with East / South Asian workers. The proliferation roughly tracks with a decrease in white (European) American representation in tech companies. US companies used to be much more like you described.

          • By democracy 2026-02-1619:28

            AtlasSian? Canva? Absolutely the same process in Australia. Smaller shops/contractors - sure.

      • By killbot5000 2026-02-1612:27

        > Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

        The code’s value is measured in its usefulness to control and extend the Facebook system. Without the system, the code is worthless. On the flip side, the system’s value is also tied to its ability to change… which is easier to do if the code is well organized, verified, and testable.

      • By DeusExMachina 2026-02-1612:05

        > If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

        I'm not sure how this follows logically from the comment you are replying to, which states:

        > We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities.

      • By LMYahooTFY 2026-02-166:442 reply

        This is exactly right.

        The goal is delivering a useful product to someone, which just requires secure enough, optimized enough, efficient enough code.

        Some see the security, optimization, or efficiency of the code itself as the goal. They'll be replaced.

        • By dodomodo 2026-02-167:13

          As long as AI can't make the code optimized and secure by itself, and these day it still can't, those people won't be replaced. And when they do get replaced there is no guarantee that the more "entrepreneur" population won't get replaced as well.

        • By simpleusername 2026-02-168:58

          Except it wasn't and still isn't secure enough.

      • By cookiengineer 2026-02-1611:20

        You are replying to someone whose account name is tabs_or_spaces, which in itself is so ironic that I have no word for it.

        What people don't seem to realize is that like you pointed out there's a demand for the previous "developer relations" type of job though, and that job kind of evolved through LLM agents into something like an influencer(?) type position.

        If I would take a look at influencers and what they're able to build, it's not that hardcore optimized and secured and tested program codebase, they don't have the time to acquire and hone those skills. They are the types who build little programs and little solutions for everyday use cases that other people "get inspired with".

        You could argue that this is something like a teacher role, and something like the remaining social component of the human to human interface that isn't automated yet. Well, at least not until the first generation of humans grew up with robotic nannies. Then it's a different, lower threshold of acceptance.

      • By networkcat 2026-02-167:09

        Yes, Facebook's early PHP code looks pretty bad by today's standards

        Facebook PHP Source Code from August 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406#file-index-php

      • By antfarm 2026-02-1611:43

        > Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful.

        It may look like that, but many of the products with bad code didn't even make it into your vibe statistics because they weren't around for long enough.

      • By groundtruthdev 2026-02-1614:531 reply

        Would you feel comfortable flying on an airplane where the programmers don’t care about secure code, correctness, or the ability to reason about and optimize algorithms—where “good enough” is the philosophy? Most people intuitively say no, because in safety-critical and large-scale systems, engineering rigor isn’t optional. Software may look intangible, but when it runs aircraft, banking systems, or global platforms, the same discipline applies.

        The “Facebook/YouTube codebases are a mess so code quality doesn’t matter” line is also misleading. Those companies absolutely hire—and pay very well—engineers who obsess over security, performance, and algorithmic efficiency, because at that scale engineering quality directly translates to uptime, cost, and trust.

        Yes, the visible product layers move fast and can look messy. But underneath are extremely disciplined infrastructure, security, and reliability teams. You don’t run global systems on vibe-coded foundations. People who genuinely believe correctness and efficiency don’t matter wouldn’t last long in the parts of those organizations that actually keep the lights on.

        • By juggle-anyhow 2026-02-1614:592 reply

          Do you think the people writing the code that operates aircraft care about code quality? After the boeing incident I do not.

          • By groundtruthdev 2026-02-1615:041 reply

            Fair point and that’s exactly why Airbus has been eating Boeing’s lunch. When engineering culture takes a back seat to cost, schedule, and optics, outcomes diverge fast. In safety-critical systems, rigor isn’t optional, it’s the competitive advantage.

            • By bronco21016 2026-02-1620:01

              I find it difficult to believe software is Airbus’ competitive edge. First, their software for aircrew bidding is an absolute and utter disaster. Date filtering has been broken nearly a year despite multiple releases being pushed. Date management is like THE KEY functionality of aircrew bidding. I also use their flight plan software and it’s like they never bothered to ask a pilot how they use a flight plan in flight.

              I think Airbus is riding the coat tails of solid engineering done in the 80s and continuing to iterate that platform vs Boeing trying to iterate on a hardware platform from the 60s. Airbus benefited significantly from 20s years of engineering and technological progress. Since the original design of the A320, changes have been incremental. Slightly different engines, addition of GPS/GNS, CPDLC, CRT to LCD screens. Meanwhile Boeing has attempted to take a steam gauge design from the 60s and retrofit decades of technology improvements and, critically, they attempted to add engines significantly altering the aerodynamics of the aircraft.

          • By addaon 2026-02-205:29

            Which Boeing incident? The 737 Max was a correct implementation of bad requirements -- there's no indication of a code quality problem here. Starliner definitely had more indications of code issues, but was not an aircraft.

      • By kamaal 2026-02-1614:27

        >>It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank

        Competitive coding is oversold in this generation. You can log in to most of these sites and you will see thousands of solutions submitted to each problem. There is little incentive to reward situations where you solved some problem which a thousand other people have solved.

        To that end its also a intellectual equivalent of video game addiction. There is some kind of illusion that you are indulging in a extremely valuable and productivity enterprise, but if you observe carefully nothing much productive actually gets done.

        Only a while back excessive chess obsession had similar problems. People spending whole days doing things which make them feel special and intelligent, but to any observer at a distance its fairly obvious they are wasting time and getting nothing done.

      • By amelius 2026-02-1615:10

        > you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

        Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.

      • By weinzierl 2026-02-168:02

        And yet most companies don’t hire primarily for vision and creativity. They need far more people who can execute someone else’s vision reliably. You can’t neither win the battle nor the war with only generals.

        Visionaries are important, but they’re a small part of what makes a successful organization. The majority hinges on disciplined engineers who understand the plan, work within the architecture, and ship what’s needed

        As Victor Wooten once said: "If you’re in the rhythm section, your job is to make other people sound better." That’s what most engineering positions actually are and there’s real skill and value in doing that well.

      • By bilekas 2026-02-1610:05

        > Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful. I bet both youtube and facebook's codebase is a tangled mess.

        This is such a bad take and flat out wrong. Your ability to deliver and maintain features is directly impacted by the quality of the code. You can ship a new slop project every day if you like, but in order for it to scale or manage real traffic and usage you need to have a good foundation. This is such a bad approach to Software engineering.

      • By abm53 2026-02-1610:30

        > If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

        The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.

        The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.

        That’s an open question.

      • By collimarco 2026-02-1615:04

        > your proven ability to deliver useful products

        Which is not the case. It's just a useless product, without any real use case, which also introduces large security bugs in your system.

      • By coldtea 2026-02-1611:39

        >It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

        For a programmer, that's based on them "being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank".

        For manager types it might be "Creativity, drive, vision, whatever".

        >Code is a means to an end

        For a business in general.

        When hiring developers, code IS the end.

      • By asveikau 2026-02-1619:09

        > If [you] ... take pride in your secure code

        I don't object to most of what you're saying, but I take issue with this part.

        This happens to be an area where lapse or neglect can be taken as a moral failure. And here you are mocking people who are concerned about it.

        If someone uses AI to architect a bridge and the bridge collapses, you couldn't say that the structural integrity of the bridge wasn't the important part.

      • By ljm 2026-02-1612:45

        But it also looks like these companies value and pay for the tech bro version of a snake oil consultant. And that you still have to have a lot of things going in your favour for your own brand of slop to elevate you to tech celebrity status. I don't see anybody who isn't already well-connected or financially comfortable pulling this off because nobody who has something to lose will slop their way to the top.

        I don't think it's a good thing that the craft of software engineering is so easily devalued this way. We can quite demonstrably show that AI is not even close to replacing people in this respect.

        Am I speaking out of envy or jealousy? Maybe. But I find it disappointing that we have yet more perverse incentives to hyper-accelerate delivery and externalise the consequences on to the users. It's a very unserious place to be.

      • By chamomeal 2026-02-1612:51

        Delivering a product is one thing. Continuing to upgrade it and maintain it indefinitely is another. Good quality code makes it easier to make improvements and changes as time goes on. Doesn’t matter if you’re a human or an LLM.

        Also, has anybody looked through the Openclaw source? Maybe it’s not so bad

      • By jorvi 2026-02-1619:48

        > you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products.

        Ah, right. Write "Brew", which gets used by thousands of devs at Google every day, and then get rejected in an interview.

      • By 1000xcat 2026-02-1611:24

        It took me a while to realise that most people don't care how it's done or how it works they just want something useful and working (even if it's vibe coded or duct taped)

      • By 2OEH8eoCRo0 2026-02-1613:39

        Tell that to the creator of Homebrew, Max Howell

        > "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

      • By m000 2026-02-1611:18

        > you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

        Or, in this case, just because they need a poster boy for their product, which isn't as good as they say it is.

      • By almostdeadguy 2026-02-1613:24

        Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.

      • By lbrito 2026-02-1617:38

        >you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

        Tell that to the guy that made brew and tried to interview at Google

      • By dinkumthinkum 2026-02-167:29

        I think you are really just describing an outlier. Most people really do get hired for the first thing. This is a situation where someone went viral and got a job. I don't think this is sort of the rule. The thing about "proven ability to deliver ..." is just kind of cope recruiters tell themselves and other people. It's nice but its not how things cache out in the real world.

      • By skywalqer 2026-02-1611:06

        You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?

      • By wasmainiac 2026-02-168:031 reply

        > Quality of code has never had anything to do with which products are successful

        This is just wrong. Plenty of examples of crap code causing major economic losses.

        • By brohee 2026-02-1610:36

          Exactly, quality of code is one of those necessary but not sufficient things... If you are somehow successful without quality of code (e.g. early Twitter maxing Rails performance) you end up either crash and burning of spending crazy amounts on infrastructure/rewrites (and often both).

      • By yaku_brang_ja 2026-02-1615:57

        This is so not true.

      • By oytis 2026-02-1612:22

        Should I be sad or rather relieved that grifters will be able to grift without my help? I would just accept the reality and reeducate myself to some other field where hard engineering is still required, but I'm afraid AI will advance faster than my degree.

      • By robotpepi 2026-02-168:12

        I mean, you're right but at the same time you're talking about something completely different. Software with security vulnerabilities is not a useful product. You don't address the raised issues.

      • By conartist6 2026-02-1612:06

        ...huh?

        10x programmers aren't the ones grinding hacker-rank.

        Neither are the programmers like me who actually focus on building good systems under any significant threat.

        And Facebook's codebase is pretty decent for the most part, you'd probably be shocked. Benefits of moving fast and breaking things include making developer experience a priority. That's why they made Hacklang to get off PHP and why they made React and helped make Prettier

      • By getoffit 2026-02-1619:05

        > Code is a means to an end.

        Product is a means to an end.

        Being good at something is a means to an end.

        That end? Barter for food and shelter, medicine.

        The means to do so; code or delivery of a product; are eventually all depreciated, and thrown away. You eventually age into uselessness and die.

        Suddenly having an epiphany it's not about code but product! way too late in the game, HN... you're just trying to look like you got it figured out and bring deep fucking value to humanity right as "idea to product without intermediary code layer" is about to ship[1]. You already missed your window.

        You still don't get the change that's needed and happening due to automation; few of us want to put you on their shoulders and sing songs about you all.

        Hop off the Hedonistic Treadmill and get some help.

        [1] am working on idea to binary at day job, which will flood the market with options and drown yours out

    • By cube00 2026-02-166:173 reply

      > 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.

      • By jrowen 2026-02-167:06

        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.

      • By sph 2026-02-166:281 reply

        pets.com moment

        • By jeffrallen 2026-02-166:331 reply

          Nah, I'm getting more of a webvan vibe...

          • By SJC_Hacker 2026-02-167:431 reply

            The irony about Webvan, it was a good idea, but too early.

            Kinda like the Apple Newton

            • By Symbiote 2026-02-168:24

              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.

    • By catwell 2026-02-168:522 reply

      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.

      • By deanc 2026-02-1611:151 reply

        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.

        • By stitched2gethr 2026-02-172:16

          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.

      • By debugnik 2026-02-169:101 reply

        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.

        • By planb 2026-02-1614:07

          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.

    • By westonplatter0 2026-02-166:311 reply

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

      • By indemnity 2026-02-167:031 reply

        His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.

        He’s not just a “vibe coder”.

        • By u02sgb 2026-02-168:28

          There's an excellent Changelog podcast interviewing him which talks about his early career as well.

    • By conradev 2026-02-1615:091 reply

      Peter has been prolific and talented long before AI tools. I became familiar with his work a decade ago: https://github.com/steipete/PSTCollectionView

      People seem to think that because we all have the same tools and because they’re increasingly agentic, that the person wielding the tool has become less relevant, or that the code itself has become less relevant.

      That is just not the case, at least yet, and Peter is applying a decade plus of entrepreneurial and engineering experience.

      • By BoggleFiend 2026-02-1616:25

        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-cl...

    • By loandbehold 2026-02-167:131 reply

      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.

      • By stingraycharles 2026-02-1615:321 reply

        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.

        • By matthewkayin 2026-02-1619:381 reply

          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.

    • By h14h 2026-02-1617:10

      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.

    • By enieslobby 2026-02-167:511 reply

      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.

      • By imjonse 2026-02-167:582 reply

        > a project that people want,

        do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?

        • By elAhmo 2026-02-1611:18

          Many people use it.

          Also he made a few other products, some of which were used probably by more than a billion people.

        • By Flockster 2026-02-1612:211 reply

          Judging by the Openrouter-Rankings it is No. 1 or 2 in token usage, depending on the view (daily, weekly, monthly).

          • By dieortin 2026-02-1612:56

            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

    • By pjmlp 2026-02-166:12

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

    • By tin7in 2026-02-167:071 reply

      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.

      • By mattmanser 2026-02-167:302 reply

        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.

        • By tin7in 2026-02-168:081 reply

          > 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.

          • By mattmanser 2026-02-1619:211 reply

            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.

            • By MangoCoffee 2026-02-1619:44

              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.

        • By KellyCriterion 2026-02-1612:11

          do you know about www.linktr.ee ? :-D :-D

    • By sauercrowd 2026-02-1610:581 reply

      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.

      • By jonmc12 2026-02-1620:09

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

    • By ryanar 2026-02-1611:241 reply

      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.

      • By bhaak 2026-02-1616:04

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

    • By mvkel 2026-02-1615:59

      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.

    • By spaceman_2020 2026-02-166:122 reply

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

      • By bananaboy 2026-02-166:172 reply

        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.

        • By bogtap82 2026-02-166:471 reply

          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.

          • By dieortin 2026-02-1612:57

            Even if the conversation was on other sites, people would still search for it.

        • By aixpert 2026-02-166:371 reply

          he likely poured oil into the flame investing a few hundred bucks to double the virality

          • By spaceman_2020 2026-02-1622:25

            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?

      • By imiric 2026-02-167:201 reply

        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.

        • By Gracana 2026-02-1613:081 reply

          > He made a social network for bots, FFS.

          Matt Schlicht made Moltbook, not Peter Steinberger.

          • By imiric 2026-02-1614:46

            Well, you got me. That changes everything.

    • By elAhmo 2026-02-1611:17

      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.

    • By baby 2026-02-166:40

      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)

    • By thecupisblue 2026-02-1615:04

      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.

    • By figassis 2026-02-1621:48

      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.

    • By hmokiguess 2026-02-1614:01

      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.

    • By FreeRadical 2026-02-168:32

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

    • By qingcharles 2026-02-166:301 reply

      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...

      • By AlexCoventry 2026-02-167:59

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

    • By rippeltippel 2026-02-166:24

      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.

    • By anilakar 2026-02-1610:04

      > 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.

    • By alberto467 2026-02-1611:26

      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.

    • By sathish316 2026-02-1617:26

      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

    • By BryantD 2026-02-168:43

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

    • By jrowen 2026-02-166:44

      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.

    • By democracy 2026-02-167:05

      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.

    • By Aurornis 2026-02-1615:37

      > 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.

    • By column 2026-02-168:47

      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.

    • By imjonse 2026-02-167:55

      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.

    • By giancarlostoro 2026-02-1619:261 reply

      > 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.

      • By chillacy 2026-02-1620:561 reply

        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)

        • By giancarlostoro 2026-02-1622:181 reply

          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

          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

          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).

          • By handfuloflight 2026-02-170:40

            Why have the issues tracked on the file system at all if it can be represented in Github issues and be accessed via tool calls? Also how are you handling sub task management, are you able to link closed checkboxes in the Github issues or?

    • By wasmainiac 2026-02-167:581 reply

      > 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.

      • By throwaway2037 2026-02-168:142 reply 

            > 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.

        • By m000 2026-02-1611:341 reply

          > 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.

          • By tredre3 2026-02-181:141 reply

            Your comment applies equally well to aspiring actors. The similarity between actors and influencers is more than superficial.

            • By throwaway2037 2026-02-1916:17

              You make a good point. And what is wrong with kids wanting to become an actor? It seems fine to me. Most actors never make it big. They work a side hustle (waitor/waitress, etc.), then try-out for various roles. I have a brother who was a musician and artist for many years. He worked a variety of temp jobs in a big city ("office work") to fund his music/art lifestyle.

        • By wasmainiac 2026-02-1615:03

          > What's wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber?

          Which YouTubers are we talking about here? Hobbiests? People chasing social clout? People who like making stuff and sharing it? People pushing negativ social attitudes? Context matters.

          I’m talking about young adults not preparing for their future because they think they are going to become millionaires on YouTube, they focus on what is essentially a culture of grifting, with a success rate similar to winning a lottery.

          Im not sure what has to change, but the current state of things is not healthy.

    • By Kiro 2026-02-168:191 reply

      > 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.

      • By LtWorf 2026-02-1610:351 reply

        As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?

        • By Kiro 2026-02-1612:12

          Yeah, the small local newspaper for my town of 30k is a paid shill for OpenClaw. Amazing comment.

    • By nedt 2026-02-169:18

      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.

    • By re5i5tor 2026-02-172:19

      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.

    • By closewith 2026-02-166:132 reply

      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.

    • By nasmorn 2026-02-1612:03

      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.

    • By Ultimatt 2026-02-167:17

      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.

    • By mempko 2026-02-1616:49

      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?

    • By koe123 2026-02-1612:12

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

    • By shin_lao 2026-02-1615:43

      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.

    • By wanderingmind 2026-02-169:01

      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

    • By neop1x 2026-02-1618:02

      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.

    • By antfarm 2026-02-1611:38

      >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.

    • By throw444420394 2026-02-168:311 reply

      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.

      • By philipallstar 2026-02-169:48

        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.

    • By secbear 2026-02-1619:20

      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

    • By powerapple 2026-02-1611:55

      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.

    • By danmaz74 2026-02-1615:28

      > vibecoded without reading any of the code

      Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?

    • By j45 2026-02-1616:39

      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.

    • By PurpleRamen 2026-02-1610:50

      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.

    • By blueblazin 2026-02-1611:24

      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?

    • By jstummbillig 2026-02-1618:21

      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.

    • By buschleague 2026-02-1620:33

      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.

    • By Aperocky 2026-02-1612:53

      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.

    • By gadders 2026-02-1610:08

      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.

    • By haebom 2026-02-1613:47

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

    • By svnt 2026-02-1619:06

      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.

    • By skeptic_ai 2026-02-1619:12

      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.

    • By girvo 2026-02-1611:06

      > 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.

    • By DivingForGold 2026-02-1612:521 reply

      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 ?

      • By ass22 2026-02-1622:56

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

    • By runjake 2026-02-1616:05

      > 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?

    • By nb777 2026-02-168:44

      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.

    • By imtringued 2026-02-1610:05

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

    • By motbus3 2026-02-1614:13

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

    • By chvid 2026-02-1612:541 reply

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

      • By jimmydoe 2026-02-1615:10

        Exactly.

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

    • By seydor 2026-02-169:32

      I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt

    • By bjourne 2026-02-169:38

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

    • By bluerooibos 2026-02-1617:46

      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.

    • By b3lvedere 2026-02-1611:24

      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.

    • By teekert 2026-02-167:35

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

    • By swiftcoder 2026-02-1612:481 reply

      > 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...

      • By morningsam 2026-02-1614:35

        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.

    • By seanoreillyza 2026-02-169:19

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

    • By 123malware321 2026-02-1612:15

      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.

    • By turtlebro 2026-02-1614:46

      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.

    • By tom_m 2026-02-1619:331 reply

      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.

      • By ass22 2026-02-1622:58

        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.

    • By eviks 2026-02-169:05

      > 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?

    • By CobrastanJorji 2026-02-167:08

      > 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.

    • By edstarch 2026-02-1617:03

      Such is life in the attention economy.

    • By qmr 2026-02-1611:40

      > 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?

    • By jv22222 2026-02-176:34

      The billion dollar homepage.

    • By thorio 2026-02-168:55

      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.

    • By Danidada 2026-02-1614:10

      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?

    • By elwatto 2026-02-1616:20

      nah. focus on building cool things people want.

    • By aerhardt 2026-02-1614:25

      > 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.

    • By ookblah 2026-02-167:32

      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.

    • By citizenpaul 2026-02-168:53

      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.

    • By malthaus 2026-02-167:293 reply

      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

      • By dinkumthinkum 2026-02-167:321 reply

        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?

        • By nedt 2026-02-169:11

          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.

      • By dns_snek 2026-02-1612:07

        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.

    • By 21asdffdsa12 2026-02-1610:30

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

    • By NuclearPM 2026-02-1716:00

      What the heck is “softwares”?

    • By benreesman 2026-02-168:12

      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.

    • By cgfjtynzdrfht 2026-02-169:53

      [dead]

  • By mmaunder 2026-02-165:314 reply

    Good move. OpenClaw is alpha quality, very dangerous, super useful and super fun - which amplifies the danger. It’s a disaster waiting to happen and a massive risk for a solo dev to take on. So best to trade it for a killer job offer and transfer all that risk.

    To get a sense of what this guy was going through listen to the first 30 mins of Lex’s recent interview with him. The cybersquatting and token/crypto bullshit he had to deal with is impressive.

    • By bananaboy 2026-02-166:153 reply

      He's not really trading anything though. He was hired by OpenAI. OpenClaw will remain free and open source (it's the first line of his blog post). He says that OpenAI will allow him to work on it and already sponsors it so maybe that means he'll have time to improve it, I guess.

      • By esskay 2026-02-1610:56

        Given he's moving to SF to work in their office I presume part of it is he'll be working in-house on their commercial replacement, and will continue to cover costs on the OSS version which he's free to work on. His recent posts make it clear they've got plans for their own stuff to replace it.

      • By brandensilva 2026-02-1617:28

        Right, he indicated he's losing $10-20k a month on OpenClaw. Might as well let OpenAI absorb those losses and join the rocket ship.

        The guy is a multi millionaire from selling his old software so I'm doubtful it is about the money for him at this point as much as it is the experience working with this tech on another level.

      • By solumos 2026-02-1617:49

        Yes, just like Jony Ive has been doing

    • By archon810 2026-02-166:25

    • By rolymath 2026-02-1612:284 reply

      > Listen to... Lex

      People can do that? I always assumed Lex was a CIA psyop to experiment with the ability to make people sleep on demand.

      • By beernet 2026-02-1616:092 reply

        While that might take it a little too far, Lex surely is a dangerous individual. On various occasions did he sympathize with the war and terror that Russia is doing in Ukraine. I do not click on any of his content because I will not support these (and a few other questionable, to say the least) views of his. Also his image of an MIT researcher is hilarious.

        • By parineum 2026-02-172:001 reply

          > On various occasions did he sympathize with the war and terror that Russia is doing in Ukraine.

          I'm not a devotee of his but I've listened to a few of his podcasts when I like the guest. I have an idea of how someone would come away with your impression given lex's interview style but I'd be pretty surprised if anything he said would, to me, fit your impression.

          That said, I'd like an example if you have something specific to point to that might change my mind or if it's just a general takeaway you've gotten from a corpus of interviews on the topic (which would be totally valid but wouldn't change my mind).

          • By beernet 2026-02-1710:541 reply

            > That said, I'd like an example if you have something specific to point to that might change my mind

            This guy wanted Putin on his podcast to hear his side of the story (let that sink in) and spoke Russian to Zelensky. Willingly wanting to provide a platform for a mass murderer who is best known for large-scale social media propaganda.

            This is not an "impression" of his "interview style". This guy implicitly supports terrorist acts.

            • By parineum 2026-02-1715:051 reply

              > This guy wanted Putin on his podcast to hear his side of the story (let that sink in)

              Many people have interviewed serial killers and not supported serial killers.

              I would very much like to know Putin's actual motivations which would unlikely be spoken but his stated motives would also be enlightening.

              I'm sure he'd go on with the standard "Nazis in Ukraine" line but in a 2-3 hour interview, I might get some new insights I don't get from 3 sentence sound bites.

              We know so much about Hitler from his own writings and speeches. It seems to me that your philosophy on "platforming" Putin would also apply to making the words of Hitler available to the public.

              Is there someone you think _could_ interview Putin responsibly?

              > spoke Russian to Zelensky

              I don't see the significance of that. They both speak Russian and English fluently. I don't know if Friedman speaks Ukranian but I'm not understanding what the implication is here. Surely the interview was in English since the podcast is?

              > This is not an "impression" of his "interview style". This guy implicitly supports terrorist acts.

              Implicitly being the key word here and is certainly subjective. If the body of evidence you're presenting is "would interview Putin" and "spoke Russian to Zelensky", I don't find that convincing.

        • By spacechild1 2026-02-1617:521 reply

          Yes. How do so many people fall for this guy? I find him pretty creepy, to be honest.

          • By cedws 2026-02-1714:56

            Pretty sure he’s a complete fraud too. He associates himself with MIT despite only having had a short stint teaching non-credit classes. One of his papers was apparently so flawed it’s been wiped from existence. Plenty of info online if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

      • By nsvd2 2026-02-1618:29

        I'm a big fan of his. I particularly enjoy his long technical interviews like the one he did with Peter.

      • By dpoloncsak 2026-02-1721:09

        You don't really listen for Lex, but his guests.

      • By lbrito 2026-02-1618:02

        He's just another alt right podcast grifter.

    • By Traster 2026-02-169:272 reply

      It really is quite funny though isn't it. Yes, it's a fucking hand grenade that will blow up at any moment. It's perfect for a one man band startup. Because there's massive upside and at the end of the day if it blows up he's just back to sqaure one, what did you expect from a 1 man band.

      But wait. Here he comes. Hero of the hour. Sam Altman.

      Let's take that wildly dangerous, lightly thought through product, and give it the backing of the leading AI lab. Let's take all that pending liability and slap it straight onto the largest private company in AI.

      • By whazor 2026-02-1610:231 reply

        OpenClaw is more like an art project than a consumer product. It has shown clear consumer product demand. The next step is making it a safer consumer product.

        • By jascha_eng 2026-02-1611:17

          > OpenClaw is more like an art project than a consumer product

          I think this is true for a lot of vibe coded applications. Never thought about calling it an art project but it hits home.

      • By alansaber 2026-02-169:44

        You definitely have a point there.

  • By asim 2026-02-1611:202 reply

    Well that was a crazy month. Kudos to this guy for recognising his goals which is not to start another company. It is very easy to get intoxicated by the idea of something being so successful that you can capture the value, especially after having struggled for so long with a previous company. I think it's every founder's dream to like just hit lightning. But this stuff is incredibly stressful and it's important to be able to look into the future and ask yourself. Is this what I want? Is this what I need in my life? And the answer here is no. This person can deliver value elsewhere quite easily and get the reward without as much stress. We should all take a lesson from this whirlwind journey. Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it. A lot of people feel a little bit of envy or jealousy. I used to feel that when I was working on something and I saw other people succeed and I wished that that had happened to me. But if it was meant for you it would find you. And the fact that it hasn't found you means that it was not meant for you. We all have our role to play. There is something important for us to do and that's not necessarily something that is world famous or amasses thousands of GitHub stars. If after reading this it's still bothering you. Take a walk and reflect on the good things in your life.

    • By hklgny 2026-02-1613:131 reply

      This feels like such a defeatist take. The ideas time had come. For luck to strike you have to be in the market for it. Just keep shipping and playing. We don’t “all have our role to play” but there are a lot of roles that need playing

      • By asim 2026-02-1613:161 reply

        But that's the point it's not defeatist. It's more about saying there is something for you to do. There is a role for you to play but that's not necessarily the role that you see somebody else playing. So sometimes we see somebody else doing something and we think whoa that person is successful and we become envious of that and then we want to emulate that. But we forget that maybe that's not what's intended for us. Maybe that person is really good at that thing or that's what was for them. But for us we might be good at something else and there might be something that we are uniquely positioned to do so. The point is not to be defeatist but not to focus on what somebody else has right. Focus on what you have and focus on what your ability is and focus on what's going to improve your quality of life and the people around you and don't focus on the negative aspects of what is effectively fomo

        • By hklgny 2026-02-1613:282 reply

          Appreciate your take. I think we’re bouncing around the same mental state from different sides.

          I do not believe in predetermined roles. My version is to find the thing you’re excited to do and not the outcome you’re excited to have.

          • By asim 2026-02-1613:49

            Yea sorry it probably comes across as pre-determined but you as a person have likely spent a long time becoming good at something and have a certain personality and experience based on your life, so I guess what I'm saying is, that sort of creates a role for you, and when you understand what that is, you can really hone in and do good work. Sometimes its not obvious to us and when we see something we might want to go after it. That's fine. I guess my point is, don't look at the shiny thing and chase that. It's not what's going to fulfil you in life e.g Peter probably wasn't chasing the shiny thing. He was trying to solve a personal problem and it resonated with a lot of people. But when people see something be successful or this kind of wildride where you end up with a hugely successful project and go to a huge company like OpenAI, they focus on the wrong things. The inner insecurity takes over and you wonder, why not me, and how do I do that. But essentially it comes back to, solve problems. Solve interesting problems, work on things that you think are meaningful, and whatever the success might be, that's for someone else to decide. But I think people chase "fame", cause that's what we essentially see. Validation through popularity. It won't fulfil you. Trust me. But yes to your point. We're coming at the same thing from different angles.

          • By Chrupiter 2026-02-1619:39

            What if the thing that excites you can't pay you money, and you find your overall life unsatisfying because of the things you have to do to earn money? Sorry, went a bit off rails there.

    • By stingraycharles 2026-02-1615:39

      > Do not attempt to be like Peter. You can admire the work he's done. Do not attempt to replicate it. Appreciate it for what it is. For yourself as an observer or a user it's a lesson. But also to note that this is an anomaly. You will never replicate it.

      This can be said about a lot of successful projects, products, and companies. I’d argue that, by all means, do try to be like Peter. Try to tinker around and make something new the world has never seen before.

      He made something that excited many people, and I don’t think it’s the correct take to consider this an anomaly. It’s someone who was already known in the development community trying something new and succeeding.

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