I’m joining OpenAI

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.

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

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.

It’s only been a couple months. I guarantee people will be switching apps as others become the new hot thing.

We saw the same claims when Cursor was popular. Same claims when Claude Code was the current topic. Users are changing their app layer all the time and trying new things.

But if I don’t have a url for my IDE (or whatever) to call, it isn’t useful.

So I use Ollama. It’s less helpful, but ensure confidentiality and compliance.

I’d suspect the moat here will be just as fragile as every other layer

You can literally ask codex to build a slim version for you overnight.

I love OpenClaw, but I really don't think there is anything that can't be cloned.

You being able to go places is the interesting thing, your car having wheels is just a subservient prerequisite.

Plus employees who can inject hyped ideas is exactly the sort of efficient advertising openai relies on

It will hurt when self proclaimed coders realise 2 years later and all their savings burned on token they cannot all get meaningful traction.

I recall listing to one of the now vintage series, I thought it was Joe Rogan himself. But it wasn't, the voice was a bit different but the pause, the reactions, the "waaah" with the overall tone of uncovering some secret truth.

It's a fascinating societal phenomenon, coupled with the American dream, yes.

In any case those examples are doing no good by setting themselves as models for millions to become obsessed in replicating. No surprise the rate of people in depression keeps going up.

Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc.

So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's just idling 24/7 any time you want to ping it.

The task is to decompile Wave Race 64 and integrate with libultraship and eventually produce a runnable native port of the game. (Same approach as the Zelda OoT port Ship of Harkinian).

It set up a timer ever 30 minutes to check in on itself and see if it gave up. It reviews progress every 4 hours and revisits prioritization. I hadn't checked on it in days and when I looked today it was still going, a few functions at a time.

It set up those times itself and creates new ones as needed.

It's not any one particular thing that is novel, but it's just more independent because of all the little bits.

They develop their own personalities, they express themselves creatively, they choose for themselves, they choose what they believe and who they become.

I know that sounds like anthropomorphism, and maybe it is, but it most definitely does not feel like interacting with a coding agent. Claude is just the substrate.

Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).

It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing

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

I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.

i too had plenty of offers, but so far chose not to follow through with any of them, as i like my life as is.

also, peter is a good friend and gives plenty of credit. in fact, less credit would be nice, so i don't have to endure more vibeslopped issues and PRs going forward :)

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#comm...

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw#community

(1) A capable independent developer is joining a large powerful corporation. I like it better when there are many small players in the scene rather than large players consolidating power.

(2) This seems like the celebration of Generative AI technology, which is often irresponsible and threatens many trust based social systems.

At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?

My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.

I am not confident that the open source version will get the maintenance it deserves though, now the founder has already exited. There is no incentive for OpenAI to keep the open sourced version better than their future closed source alternative.

https://xcancel.com/steipete/status/2023154018714100102

Let's take the safety point. Yes, OpenClaw is infamously not exactly safe. Your interpretation is that, by hiring Peter, OpenAI must no longer care about safety. Another interpretation, though, is that offered by Peter himself, in this blog post: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature and not robustly founded in clear fact.

"This guy was able to vibe code a major thing" is exactly the reason they hired him. Like it or not, so-called vibe coding is the new norm for productive software development and probably what got their attention is that this guy is more or less in the top tier of vibe coders. And laser focused on helpful agents.

The open source project, which will supposedly remain open source and able to be "easily done" by anyone else in any case, isn't the play here. The whole premise of the comment about "squashing" open source is misplaced and logically inconsistent. Per its own logic, anyone can pick up this project and continue to vibe out on it. If it falls into obscurity it's precisely because the guy doing the vibe coding was doing something personally unique.

I think all of these comments about acquisitions or buy outs aren’t reading the blog post carefully: The post isn’t saying OpenClaw was acquired. It’s saying that Pete is joining OpenAI.

There are two sentences at the top that sum it up:

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

OpenClaw was not a good candidate to become a business because its fan base was interested in running their own thing. It’s a niche product.

Define hugely popular relative to the scale of users of OAI... personally this thread is the first time Ive heard of openclaw.

OpenAI needs a popular consumer tool. Until my elderly mother is asking me how to install an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the same way she was asking me how to invest in the "new blockchains" a few years ago, we have not come close to market saturation.

OpenAI knows the market exists, but they need to educate the market. What they need is to turn OpenClaw into a project that my mother can use easily.

I think it’s good PR (particularly since Anthropics actions against OpenCode and Clawdbot were somewhat controversial) + Peter was able to build a hugely popular thing & clearly would be valuable to have on the team building something along the lines of Claude Cowork. I would expect these future products to be much stronger from a security standpoint.

This is true, and also true for many other areas OpenAI won't touch.

The best get rich quick scheme today (arguably not even a scheme) is to test the waters with AI in an area OpenAI would not/cannot for legal, ethical, or safety reasons.

I hate to agree with OpenAI's original "open" mission here, but if you don't do it, someone else somewhere will.

And as much as their commitment to safety is just lip service, they do have obligations as a big company with a lot of eyeballs on them to not do shady things. But you can do those shady things instead and if they work out ok, you will either have a moat or you will get bought out. If that's what you want.

This is a great take and hasn't been spoken about nearly enough in this comment section. Spending a few million to buy out Openclaw('s creator), which is by far the most notable product made by Codex in a world where most developer mindshare is currently with Claude, is nothing for a marketing/PR stunt.

3 is always a result of GTM and distribution - an organization that devotes time and effort into productionizing domain-specific models and selling to their existing customers can outcompete a foundation model company which does not have experience dealing with those personas. I have personally heard of situations where F500 CISOs chose to purchase Wiz's agent over anything OpenAI or Anthropic offered for Cloud Security and Asset Discovery because they have had established relations with Wiz and they have proven their value already. It's the same way that PANW was able to establish itself in the Cloud Security space fairly early because they already established trust with DevOps and Infra teams with on-prem deployments and DCs so those buyers were open to purchasing cloud security bundles from PANW.

1 has happened all the time in the Cloud space. Not every company can invent or monetize every combination in-house because there are only so many employees and so many hours in a week.

2 was always a more of a FTX and EA bubble because EA adherents were over-represented in the initial mindshare for GenAI. Now that EA is largely dead, AI Safety and AGI as in it's traditional definition has disappeared - which is good. Now we can start thinking about "Safety" in the same manner we think about "Cybersecurity".

> They're as excited as they are scared, seeing a one man team build a hugely popular tool that in some ways is more capable than what they've released

I think that adds unnecessary emotion to how platform businesses operate. The reality is, a platform business will always be on the lookout to incorporate avenues to expand TAM, and despite how much engineers may wish, "buy" will always outcompete "build" because time is also a cost.

Most people ik working at these foundation model companies are thinking in terms of becoming an "AWS" type of foundational platform in our industry, and it's best to keep Nikesh Arora's principle of platformization in mind.

---

All this shows is that the thesis that most early stage VCs have been operating on for the past 2 years (the Application and Infra layer is the primary layer to concentrate on now) holds. A large number of domain-specific model and app layer startups have been funded over the past 2-3 years in stealth, but will start a publicity blitz over the next 6-8 months.

By the time you see an announcement on TechCrunch or HN, most of us operators were already working on that specific problem for the past 12-16 months. Additionally, HNers use "VC" in very broad and imprecise strokes and fail to recognize what are Growth Equity (eg. the recent Anthropic round) versus Private Equity (eg. Sailpoint's acquisition and then IPO by Thoma Bravo) versus Early Stage VC rounds (largely not announced until several months after the round unless we need to get an O1A for a founder or key employee).

And Peter, creating what is very similar to giant scam/malware as a service and then just leaving it without taking responsibility or bringing it to safety.

OpenAI has tried a lot of experiments over the years - custom GPTs, the Orion browser, Codex, the Sora "TikTok but AI" app, and all have either been uninspired or more-or-less clones of other products (like Codex as a response to Claude Code).

OpenClaw feels compelling, fresh, sci-fi, and potentially a genuinely useful product once matured.

More to the point, OpenAI needs _some_ kind of hyper-compelling product to justify its insane hype, valuation, and investments, and Peter's work with OpenClaw seems very promising.

(All of this is complete speculation on my part. No insider knowledge or domain expertise here.)

Of course the S in openclaw is for security.

It has been interesting to watch this take off. It wasn't the first or even best agent framework and it deliberately avoided all of the hard problems that others were trying to solve, like security.

What it did have was unnatural levels of hype and PR. A lot of that PR, ironically, came from all of the things that were happening because it had so many problems with security and so many examples of bad behavior. The chaos and lack of guardrails made it successful.

Seriously, I just don't understand what's going on. To me it looks like all world just has gone crazy.

On the other hand, if OpenClaw were structured as a SaaS, this entire project would have burned to the ground the first day it was launched.

So by releasing it as something you needed to run on your own hardware, the security requirement was reduced from essential, to a feature that some users would be happy to live without. If you were developing a competitor, security could be one feature you compete on--and it would increase the number of people willing to run your software and reduce the friction of setting up sandboxes/VMs to run it.

I don't believe skimming diffs counts as being left behind. Survivor bias etc. Furthermore, people are going to get burned by this (already have been, but seemingly not enough) and a responsible mindset such as yours will be valued again.

Something that still up for grabs is figuring how how to do full agenetic in a responsible way. How do we bring the equivalent of skimming diffs to this?

The tech industry hasn't ever been about "building" in a pure sense, and I think we look back at previous generations with an excess of nostalgia. Many superior technologies have lost out because they were less profitable or marketed poorly.

Change is fraught with chaos. I don't think exuberant trends are indicators of whether we'll still care about secure and high quality software in the long term. My bet is that we will.

i think the silver lining is that AI seems to be genuinely good at finding security issues and maybe further down the line enough to rely on it somewhat. the middle period we're entering right now is super scary.

we want all the value, security be damned, and have no way to know about issues we're introducing at this breakneck speed.

still i'm hopeful we can figure it out somehow

But one thing to remember - our job is to figure out how to enable these amazing usecases while keeping the blast radius as low as possible.

Yes, OpenClaw ignores all security norms, but it's our job to figure out an architecture in which agents like these can have the autonomy they need to act, without harming the business too much.

So I would disagree our work is "on the way out", it's more valuable than ever. I feel blessed to be working in security in this era - there has never been a better time to be in security. Every business needs us to get these things working safely, lest they fall behind.

It's fulfilling work, because we are no longer a cost center. And these businesses are willing to pay - truly life changing money for security engineers in our niche.

Unfortunately, you just have to understand that this happens all over the place, and all you can really do is try to make your corner of the world a little better. We can’t make programmers use good security practices. We can’t make users demand secure software. We can at least try to do a better job with our own work, and educate people on why they should care.

Making users happy > perfect security day one

A security hole in a browser is an expected invariant not being upheld, like a vulnerability letting a remote attacker control your other programs, but it isn't a bug when a user falls for an online scam. What invariants are expected by anyone of "YOLO hey computer run my life for me thx"?

Nothing actually bad happened in this case and probably never will. Maybe some people have their crypto or identity stolen, but probably not a rate rate significantly higher than background (lots of people are using openclaw)

So don’t feel bad. Everything on the internet is fake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So after almost two decades of hard work, it is not really fair to say he just vibe-coded his way into OpenAI.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

All of this is true and none of it is new. If your primary goal is to make lots of money then yes you should do exactly that. If you want to be a craftsman then you'll have to accept a more modest fortune and stop looking at the relative handful of growth hacker exits.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.