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.
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.
> 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
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'..."
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.
This story made my day, thanks!
I mean, maybe he was a revolutionary. One could describe what Vercel is selling as some kind of "wget optimizer" as well
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.
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
No end of Juliuses. And they're not even the worst type you can meet at a software company.
There are so many. I think if you haven't met a Julius, chances are you are Julius..
I wonder, how does a Julius perceive another Julius, as another competent worker? What about a non-Julius then?
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.
Humans are social animals and good social skills is a major benefit almost everywhere, including at work. This does not make most people juliuses.
> 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.
And yet this thread is completely full of Frank Grimes.
80% of people you meet are communicating to your customers that the server doesn't have an IP address for security reasons?
80% of the people are saying that this is highly complex software. We should not expect to serve more than 4 requests per second without a full kubernetes cluster backed by 27 pods, a cloud spanner database, and 200k lines of code.
I present, our contact form.
Julius is a metaphor for a specific type of person who is ignorant and useless but has mastered the way to appear otherwise.
If you think this was about IP addresses, well ...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
People weren't underestimating it and it's not that they "couldn't be bothered". They either understood the gaping security/safety holes it creates, or were guarded against their own stupidity.
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.
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.
>But novelty doesn't make a killer app.
It often does, if killer app means popular app.
There is a difference between popular and (in)famous. OpenClaw is famous, has popularity at the moment, but is it sustainable? Will OpenClaw (or some kind of successor) still have a relevant usage (outside of fan circles) next year? Or in 5 years?
And I'm not talking about just any kind of assistant, because those are already existing for decades now with various degrees of competence and all kind of flavours.
> Will OpenClaw (or some kind of successor) still have a relevant usage (outside of fan circles) next year?
I have a feeling OpenClaw et al. will only still exist if somehow all of the gaping security holes are ever able to be closed and through some sort of magic, less than 5% of the users get hacked within the next year, but I'm not sure it's even possible to close those holes, since the entire point and usefulness of such tools is to give them root access and set them completely free.
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'.
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.
Your comment and the article expanded my world view a little bit. Thank you.
This is if not the best article i have read recently. Julius ...
My imposter syndrome is essentially fear of being julius.
90% of software engineers have a fear of being Julius
Wow, that blog post really gave me pause and has stuck in my head for the last hour or so.
> Pour celleux qui ne connaissent pas l’informatique
https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cites-2020-2-page-137?lang=fr
How about none of the above, but hired because of wanting OpenClaw?
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.
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.
Great article until the end when they talked about AI.
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.
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.
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
Nah. Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses. Because there will be other disastrous consequences to their bad decision making processes.
> Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses.
Good luck with that
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.
Or. 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. Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.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.
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.
There are only so many safety-first companies and products. The vast majority of the economy isn't optimizing for safety
> 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
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.
> Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently
Agreed, though I think that if GDPR fines were actually being levied at the recommended 4% of global revenue, we'd start treating them more similarly to a 737 crash.
> The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing
Sort of depends who they leak to. Your teen classmates who bully you to suicide? Your abusive ex who is trying to track you down to kill you? The 3-letter agency who is trying to rendition your family to an internment camp?
There are a lot of seemingly benign failure modes that become extremely lethal given the right circumstances. And because we acknowledge the potential lethality of something like a pacemaker failure, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to their mitigation (EMT teams, emergency external pacemakers, surgical teams who can rapidly place new leads, etc). For things society judges less important, mitigations are often few and far between
OT: it's not the first time I see this grammatical mistake: "didn’t trained". Is it some accepted regional variation?
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.
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.
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
Airbus pays like shit probably. Just going off the stuff I've read about Boeing.
I can confirm, they do.
It's the interesting work tax, I guess. Though this doesn't look terrible: https://www.levels.fyi/de-de/companies/airbus/salaries/softw...
Ah, you were thinking of the German branch, I was talking about the French one, in Toulouse (I have a few friends working there).
There, a team lead is doing ~$4000 net per month. So not poverty, but not great either.
I'm not sure of the situation for software engineers but ones on the aerospace and mechanical side working in aerospace in Europe are paid something on the order of 50% less than ones in the US. I always assumed it's just a supply demand problem but I haven't run the numbers.
Did you factor in the highest cost of life (including housing, healthcare, retirement, etc.) in the US in your 50% ?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And the cheapest way to distribute that to everyone will be via AI coding.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.
Right. Shopify apps, too, is a gold mine.
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.
See: Rick Rubin.
"Rick Rubin says he barely plays any instruments and has no technical ability. He just knows what he likes and dislikes and is decisive about it."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rick-rubin-anderson-cooper-60-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin_production_discogra...
> 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.
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.
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
AtlasSian? Canva? Absolutely the same process in Australia. Smaller shops/contractors - sure.
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.
> 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.
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.
Do you think the people writing the code that operates aircraft care about code quality? After the boeing incident I do not.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Except it wasn't and still isn't secure enough.
> 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
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
> 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.
> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products
Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.
>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
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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)
This is so not true.
You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?
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.
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.
>>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.
> 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.
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).
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."
Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.
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.
...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
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.
> 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.
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.
pets.com moment
Nah, I'm getting more of a webvan vibe...
The irony about Webvan, it was a good idea, but too early.
Kinda like the Apple Newton
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
He also spent 13 years building [an] OCR document engine company (PSPDFKit) before becoming an "overnight" vibe coder success story.
His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.
He’s not just a “vibe coder”.
There's an excellent Changelog podcast interviewing him which talks about his early career as well.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also surprised; building something people want and proving it is the unlock. HN first principle since the beginning.
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.
> a project that people want,
do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?
Judging by the Openrouter-Rankings it is No. 1 or 2 in token usage, depending on the view (daily, weekly, monthly).
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
Many people use it.
Also he made a few other products, some of which were used probably by more than a billion people.
I bet they did not invert a binary tree on the whiteboard, nor answered how many golf balls fit into a plane.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
do you know about www.linktr.ee ? :-D :-D
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.
If you just commit AI generated code without even looking at it it doesn't matter how many years of engineering experience you have.
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.
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
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.
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.
Going by how insanely viral OpenClaw has been on X, I don’t think any of the stars were bought
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.
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.
Even if the conversation was on other sites, people would still search for it.
he likely poured oil into the flame investing a few hundred bucks to double the virality
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.
> He made a social network for bots, FFS.
Matt Schlicht made Moltbook, not Peter Steinberger.
Well, you got me. That changes everything.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Read his backstory. He’s a high quality software engineer by background.
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.
> 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.
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)
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...
He didn't even have to be the one buying them. Lots of people benefit from a tool like OpenClaw getting popular.
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.
The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> vibecoded without reading any of the code
Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
In my view this is just an aquihire to get a headline and take ownership over this trend. Yet another pivot to build hype.
>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.
Would you like to have it removed? https://github.com/oswarld/openshears
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.
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.
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.
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
I think it is unfortunate that this is happening. After all the mishaps and wrongdoings I don't want see anyone joining openai
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?
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 ?
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.
> 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.
As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?
Yeah, the small local newspaper for my town of 30k is a paid shill for OpenClaw. Amazing comment.
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.
> 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.
Such is life in the attention economy.
Maybe think of this as a hiring of a marketer and tech influencer. And someone with the chops to create a viral product.
Exactly.
If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do good or at least useful work in public and you'd be surprised at what can happen.
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.
It’s not the code. It’s the vision and the can-do attitude. And perhaps a bit of the (earned) name.
nah. focus on building cool things people want.
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?
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.
> 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?
I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
That wasn‘t true before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801
It's also from a guy who rebranded three times (Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw) in a row and this is technically his fourth rebrand.
Props for admitting jealousy and for being honest! I often feel the same way when fixing bugs in others code.
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
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.
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?
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.
One day Atlas may shrug, but not today, atlast..
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.
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.
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.