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.

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.

You can switch models multiple times (online/proprietary, open weight, local), but you have one UI : OpenClaw.

It is in OAI's best interests to create a perception that flinging agentic swarm crap at the wall may result in lucrative job offers. Or to otherwise imply this is the golden path. They need their customers to consume ever more tokens per unit time. This highly contentious parallel agent swarm stuff is the perfect recipe.

Can any OpenClaw power users explain what value the software has provided to them over using Claude code with MCP?

I really don’t understand the value of an agent running 24/7, like is it out there working and earning a wage? Whats the real value here outside of buzzwords like an ai personal assistant that can do everything?

openclaw is inevitable type of software (as cli agents, as context-management software, as new methodologies of structuring sofware for easier AI ingestion, etc). Guy gamed, built it, guy got it.

At this point I would not expect well-rounded software as a byproduct of huge investments and PR stunts. There will be something else after LLMs, I bet people are already working on it. But current state of affairs of LLMs and all the fuss aroud them is way more peceptive, PR and emotion driven than containing intristic value.

OpenClaw is mostly a shell around this (ha!), and I've always been annoyed OpenClaw never credited those repos openly.

The pi agent repos are a joy to read, are 1/100th the size of OpenClaw, and have 95% of the functionality.

[0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono

1. OpenAI is saying with this statement "You could be multimillion while having AI do all the work for you." This buy out for something vibe coded and built around another open source project is meant to keep the hype going. The project is entirely open source and OpenAI could have easily done this themselves if they weren't so worried about being directly liable for all the harms OpenClaw can do.

2. Any pretense for AI Safety concerns that had been coming from OpenAI really fall flat with this move. We've seen multiple hacks, scams, and misaligned AI action from this project that has only been used in the wild for a few months.

3. We've yet to see any moats in the AI space and this scares the big players. Models are neck and neck with one another and open source models are not too far behind. Claude Code is great, but so is OpenCode. Now Peter used AI to program an free app for AI agents.

LLMs and AI are going to be as disruptive as Web 1 and this is OpenAI's attempt to take more control. They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released. If he can build things like this what's stopping everyone else? Better to control the most popular one than try to squash it. This is a powerful new technology and immense amounts of wealth are trying to control it, but it is so disruptive they might not be able to. It's so important to have good open source options so we can create a new Web 1.0 and not let it be made into Web 2.0

It took all of Peter’s time to move it forward, even with maintainers (who he complained got immediately hired by AI companies).

Now he’s gonna be working on other stuff at OpenAI, so OpenClaw will be dead real quick.

Also I was following him for his AI coding experience even before the whole OpenClaw thing, he’ll likely stop posting about his experiences working with AI as well

There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.

I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.

OpenAI is putting money where their mouth is: a one-man team can create a vibe-coded project, and score big.

Open-source, and hyped incredibly well.

Interesting times ahead as everyone else chases this new get-rich-quick scheme. Will be plentiful for the shovel makers.

Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.

Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.

Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)

Filling the team with people who come up with novel and interesting ways to grab attention that could possibly create vendor lock-in is probably the goal.

In spite of that, it’s incredibly obvious OpenClaw was pushed by bots across pretty much every social media platform and that’s weird and unsettling.

Add in databases, browser use, and the answer could be yes

This could be the most disruptive software we have seen

The two sides:

* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch. It was a mind-fuck having a huge hit on my hands from one day to the next, but with no obvious direction on how to capitalize on it.

* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but probably not true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a shot for the company.

This isn't a Slay The Spire reference is it?

Bringing unblockable ads to the masses. Roger that.

We can assume first that at OpenAI he's going to build the hosted safe version that, as he puts it, his mum can use. Inevitably at some point he and colleagues at OpenAI will discover something that makes the agent much more effective.

Does that insight make it into the open version? Or stay exclusive to OAI?

(I imagine there are precedents for either route.)

There is not much novel about OpenClaw. Anybody could have thought of this or done it. The reason people have not released an agent that would run by itself, edit its own code and be exposed to the internet is not that it's hard or novel - it's because it is an utterly reckless thing to do. No responsible corporate entity could afford to do it. So we needed someone with little enough to lose, enough skill and willing to be reckless enough to do it and release it openly to let everyone else absorb the risk.

I think he's smart to jump on the job opportunity here because it may well turn out that this goes south in a big way very fast.

I don't know if you'll achieve that at OpenAI or if it'll even be a good change for the world, but I genuinely wish you the best. Regardless of the news around OpenAI I still think it's great that a personal project got you a position at a company like that.

I'm extremely curious what OpenAI's offer was. The utility of more money is diminished when you're already pretty wealthy.

OpenAI has two real competitors: Anthropic in the enterprise space and Google in the consumer space. Google fell far behind early on and ceded a lot of important market share to ChatGPT. They're catching up, but the runaway success of ChatGPT provides OpenAI with a huge runway among consumers.

In the enterprise space, OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft has been a gold mine. Every company on the planet has a deep relationship with Microsoft, so being able to say "hey just add this to your Microsoft plan" has been huge for OpenAI.

The thing about enterprise is the stakes are high. Every time OpenAI signals that they're not taking AI safety seriously, Anthropic pops another bottle of champagne. This is one of those moments.

Again, I doubt it matters much either way, but if OpenAI does end up blowing up, decisions like this will be in the large pile of reasons why.

The more likely scenario is that he was hired for the amazing ability to move fast and break things.

If openai had done it themselves, immediate backlash.

The bankrupt company sponsors anything, that sounds credible.

This has been travelling on a bunch of platforms, but the niche-ish ones have fairly low engagement numbers.. in the grand scheme of things.

Hello, fellow humans

For OpenAI it’s a smart move, snatch up the creator of a viral and ride on its coat tails for the hype.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220749/https://steipete....

This is an app that would've normally had a dozen or so people behind it, all acquihired by OpenAI to find the people who really drove the project.

With AI, it's one person who builds and takes everything.

What he did is incredible, he grabbed attention of the tech community like no other...however good or bad he was at it and making it secure.

He was curious and experimental and got lucky!

Honestly, Anthropic really dropped the ball here. They could have had such an easy integration and gained invaluable research data on how people actually want to use AI — testing workflows, real-world use cases, etc. Instead, OpenAI swoops in and gets all of that. Massive missed opportunity.

The sandboxing part matters more than people think. Giving an LLM a browser with full network access and no isolation is a real security problem that most projects in this space hand-wave away.

Multi-provider LLM support (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, open-weight models via vLLM). In production with paying customers.

Happy to answer architecture questions.

My guess if this guy has taken a job for maybe $1M, effectively handing over the crown jewels to Altman for nothing.

OpenAI must be laughing their heads off.

Beads and blankets.

What I am missing is distribution. It seems impossible to get traction nowadays on social media, regardless how good your product is.

Any feedback is much appreciated.

Sounds like a threat - "I'm joining OpenSkynetAI to bring AI agents onto your harddisc too!"

Yeah, these systems are going to get absolutely rocked by exploits. The scale of damage is going to be comical, and, well, that's where we are right now.

Go get 'em, tiger. It's a brave new world. But, as with my 10 year old, I need to make sure the credit cards aren't readily available. He'd just buy $1k of robux. Who knows what sort of havoc uncorked agentic systems could bring?

One of my systems accidentally observed some AWS keys last night. Yeah. I rotated them, just in case.

furthermore Sam Altman desperately needs something cool again at OpenAI

How to mitigate this concern?

Personally I'm excited to see what he can do with more resources, OpenClaw clearly has a lot of potential but also a lot of improvements needed for his mum to use it.

Big Tech can't release software this dangerous and then figure out how to make it secure. For them it would be an absolute disaster and could ruin them.

What OpenClaw did was show us the future, give us a taste of what it would be like and had the balls to do it badly.

Technology is often pushed forwards by ostensively bad ideas (like telnet) that carve a path through the jungle and let other people create roads after.

I don't get the hate towards OpenClaw, if it was a consumer product I would, but for hackers to play around to see what is possible it's an amazing (and ridiculously simple) idea. Much like http was.

If you connected to your bank account via telnet in the 1980s or plain http in the 90s or stored your secrets in 'crypt' well, you deserved what you got ;-) But that's how many great things get started, badly, we see the flaws fix them and we get the safe version.

And that I guess is what he'll get to do now.

* OpenClaw is a straw man for AGI *

In the past, people wanting to sign a juicy contract at a FAANG were told to spend hours everyday on Leetcode.

Now? Just spend tokens until you build something that get enough traction to be seen by one of the big labs!

The real gem inside OpenClaw is pi, the agent, created by Mario Zechner. Pi is by far the best agent framework in the world. Most extensible, with the best primitives. .

Armin Ronacher , creator of flask , can go deep and make something like openclaw enterprise ready.

The value of Peter is in connecting the dots, thinking from users perspective, and bringing business perspective

The trio are friends and have together vibecoded vibetunnel.

Sam Altman, if you are reading this , get Mario and Armin today.

You work for OpenAI now. You don't have to worry about safety anymore.

The creator built a powerful social media following and capitalized on that. Fair play.

OpenAi is curating ChatGpt very well, which honestly I like, compared to other companies, maybe expect Anthropic, they are not "caring" that much

Please dispense with the “change the world” bullshit.

I understand that it’s healthy to celebrate your personal victories but in this context with this bro going to OpenAI to make 7 figures, maaaan I don’t think this guy needs our clicks.

On top of that there’s a better than 50% chance OpenAI suffocates the open source project and the alternative will be a paid privacy nightmare.

The question is whether OpenClaw will actually stay open in the world of 'Open'Ai.

Thank you, we already fucked. I am a hypocrite of course.

This fucking guy will fit right in at OpenAI.

This is a vibe coded agent that is replicable in little time. There is no value in the technology itself. There is value in the idea of personal agents, but this idea is not new.

The value is in the hype, from the perspective of OpenAI. I believe they are wrong (see next points)

We will see a proliferation of personal agents. For a short time, the money will be in the API usage, since those agents burn a lot of tokens often for results that can be more sharply obtained without a generic assistant. At the current stage, not well orchestrated and directed, not prompted/steered, they are achieving results by brute force.

Who will create the LLM that is better at following instructions in a sensible way, and at coordinating long running tasks, will have the greatest benefit, regardless of the fact the OpenClaw is under the umbrella of OpenAI or not.

Claude Opus right now is the agent that works better for this use case. It is likely that this will help Anthropic more than OpenAI. It is wise, for Anthropic, to avoid burning money for an easily replicable piece of software.

Those hypes are forgotten as fast as they are created. Remember Cursor? And it was much more a true product than OpenClaw.

Soon, personal agents will be one of the fundamental products of AI vendors, integrated in your phone, nothing to install, part of the subscription. All this will be irrelevant.

In the mean time, good for the guy that extracted money from this gold mine. He looks like a nice person. If you are reading this: congrats!

(throw away account of obvious reasons)

Meaning, these products are being created by representatives of the kind of people carrying the most privilege and having the least impact of negative decisions.

For example, Twitter did not start sanitizing location data in photos until women joined the team and indicated that such data can be used for stalking.

White rich bros do not get stalked. This problem does not exist in their universe.

The future is both amazing and shitty.

Hope OpenClaw continues to evolve. It is indeed an amazing piece of work.

And I hope sama doesn't get his grubby greedy hands on OpenClaw.

There is literally no need to shit on ur mom like that. Sorry your mom sucks at tech but can we please stop using this as a euphemism?

Props to this guy for scamming Altman this hard without writing a single line of code, or really doing anything at all other than paying for a bunch of github stars and tweets/blogposts from fellow grifters.

I'd been having conversations with ChatGPT about OpenClaw, nothing remarkable or extraordinary. Then I started a new conversation to talk about a different aspect, and GPT assumed I wanted to talk about some old PC game.

To disambiguate, I now had to refer to OpenClaw.ai. I asked it if it had some new system directive about this, and of course it denied it. Today we learn OpenAI has hired the OpenClaw developer, and he's "turning the project over to a foundation"

What’s fascinating is the pattern we’re seeing lately: people who explored the frontier from the outside now moving inside the labs. That kind of permeability between open experimentation and foundational model companies seems healthy.

Curious how this changes the feedback loop. Does bringing that mindset in accelerate alignment between tooling and model capabilities — or does it inevitably centralize more innovation inside the labs?

Either way, congrats. The ecosystem benefits when strong builders move closer to the core.