[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.

[simonw]

I stand by what I said. OpenClaw proved that "personal digital agents" are a category with a huge amount of demand, to the point that people will jump through major hoops and completely ignore the colossal security risks involved in adopting that software.

It's spawned dozens of imitations, some of which are looking quite credible.

Anthropic themselves have been cloning OpenClaw features.

I get that it's not cool to say "OpenClaw is significant and influential" but I truly believe that it is.