[mjr00]

OpenClaw is definitely not a "5 years" project pre-AI though. That was more like a month of greenfield work compressed into a weekend -- which is still really impressive, don't get me wrong! -- but I think the point is we're not seeing mature, legacy codebases get outcompeted by new, agile, AI-driven codebases; we're seeing greenfield projects get spun up faster. Which, again, is still impressive and valuable.

If agents could really compress 10 years of development into 1 year, you'd see people making e.g. HFT platforms and becoming obscenely rich, not making a fun open-source project and getting hired by OpenAI as an employee.

[simonw]

41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".

https://tools.simonwillison.net/github-repo-stats?repo=OpenC...

[sdevonoes]

Didn’t we learn anything from the past? Using loc or number of commits or github stars to measure success or productivity is so backwards. It seems everyone on the AI wagon is either young (and so they don’t know our history) or simply forgot about all the good practices in software engineering

[atomicnumber3]

That latter bit is my experience. As soon as AI enters the equation, we have to immediately ignore everything we ever learned and just type text into the prompt box, or you're not doing it right.

[krater23]

My bashscript can do that in some hours. The git repo contains no working software after that, but when that is what you want to meassure...

[timr]

Seriously? Commit count is right up there with lines of code as a classically dumb measurement of productivity.

[simonw]

Sure, but it's still a good counter to "a month of work".

[timr]

No it isn't. There's basically no upper bound on the number of commits an LLM can generate. If the LLM takes 10,000 commits to do what a human would do in 10, then the comparison is meaningless.

I don't know anything about the code quality of OpenClaw, but telling me the number of commits tells me precisely nothing of use.

[simonw]

OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors.

I expect there is no number I could bring up here that won't be instantly shot down as telling "precisely nothing". My mistake for bringing up any numbers at all.

OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them.

I'm surprised this is a hill I have to die on, but there we are.

(I'm not even a user of OpenClaw! I don't think it's secure or safe enough to use in my own life.)

[mjr00]

> OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them.

Nobody is denying that OpenClaw is popular, and nobody (in this thread, at least) is denying that AI rapidly speeds up the ability to make an initial release or prototype for greenfield projects. But the comment that spawned this discussion was:

> we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".

The issue is that you're extrapolating OpenClaw, which upon release was a month of pre-AI development work compressed into a few days, to cover the "10 years into 1 year" scenario. However, this isn't appropriate because software development is non-linear. As anyone who has worked on a greenfield project pre-AI should know, those first weeks and months have much faster development cycles. There's no tech debt to worry about; there's no urgent bug tickets or feature requests from customers; there's no thinking about whether it's okay to ship a breaking change.

[timr]

> OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors.

You're counting forks and stars as code metrics now? Oy.

Look, those aren't nothing -- they're a decent enough proxy for popularity -- but they aren't a rebuttal to the original comment. (The other day some LLM dudebro got a bajillion stars on GH for his vibe-coded hot mess of a repo that sets three environment variables. I should go check the number of commits on that...)

> OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them. I'm surprised this is a hill I have to die on, but there we are.

The fundamental problem here is that you were asked to provide an example of some software where LLMs have made a revolutionary difference, and OpenClaw is what you chose. That just says a lot, right there.

I don't even really care about that debate, since OpenClaw probably meets the literal requirements of the original question (if not the spirit), and sure, it's had a big splash. But the point of the OP is well-taken: everyone is so "productive", but if the only thing we're seeing from it is Moltbook and 10,001 half-broken pokemon games, then eventually the bloom is going to fall off the rose.

The fact that you felt you had to rebut the "I could do that in a weekend" guy with commit counts is both poetic and oddly fitting for where we are with these things.

[sdevonoes]

It isn’t man. Anyone can easily split a single good commit into 10 just to inflate the numbers. C’mon, this is 101 git

[mjr00]

> 41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work".

I meant a month for the initial release, not current state.

Regardless, much like lines of code, number of commits is not a good metric, not even as a proxy, for how much "work" was actually done. Quickly browsing there are plenty[0] of[1] really[2] small[3] commits[4]. Agentic coding naturally optimizes for small commits because that's what the process is meant to do, but it doesn't mean that more work is being done, or that the work is effective. If anything, looking at the changelog[5] OpenClaw feels like a directionless dumpster fire right now. I would expect a lot more from a project if it had multiple people working on it for 5 years, pre-AI.

[0] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/e43ae8e8cd1ffc07...

[1] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/377c69773f0a1b8e...

[2] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/ffafa9008da249a0...

[3] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/506b0bbaad312454...

[4] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/512f777099eb19df...

[5] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

[simonw]

That's why my original comment said:

> (Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)

I brought up OpenClaw here because the challenge was:

> we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".

[thunky]

You're framing it like the only barrier to writing wildly successful money printing software is software development skills.

If that were true, all of these anti-AI greybeards who have been in the game for 30 years would all own their own jets.