His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?
The execution in case of Openclaw is a hot mess.
I don't think there's any way most people would call that lean. It's lean in exactly 1 axis which is people, but no one really cares about that, people is always a proxy for cost.
The site say 1200 Github contributors and looking on Github there are now 2105 so it doesn't seem to be dropping that much.
If these methods prove successful it isn't going to matter. A user doesn't care if code is 'slop' or artisanal, so long as the app/site/whatever works.
If you can combine autonomous flows (and millions of dollars in tokens) to produce work comparable to a traditional engineering team, then why would the user care which wrote the app/site/whatever?
Agricultural mechanisation didn't eliminate human labor over the 20th century. A huge fraction of the world's farmers have little or no mechanization today, well over a century after the invention of the revolutionary farm tractor.
With apologies to Ada Lovelace, but humanity has been writing code in anger for only like, 80 years? We'll still be at it in a 100 more.
I'm personally just impressed with the rate of improvement and _hope_ that it will continue, and that inference prices will fall (or on-device LLM become more feasible/powerful).
Anyway I appreciate your perspective even though I don't necessarily share it