Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zxornand 30 days ago
And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr?

Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.

3 comments

> And was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr?

He was. When it comes to marketing. This is was most people don't understand. Peter is a great marketing guy who got hired because of a hype vision, not because he is an outstanding engineer. Think of it like OpenAI hiring MrBeast of the coding world.

That is a good comparison. He has the charm and output quality of Mr Beast, but also his marketing prowess.

Now let's wait until the moderators clean up the wrongthink. He also has censors on his side.

I 'd say he is an outstanding engineer as well. He may favor output over security more than outstanding engineers at 2025 but in the 2026 world what he does is impressive. And with OpenAI's resources he has turned OpenClaw's security woes around. Latest versions are much more secure than 2 months ago.
It’s much worse than that. Openclaw cosplays security, which is much more dangerous than just outright defining the security model as “this is new and risky, better sandbox this thing thoroughly at a different layer”.

It sucks at both security and usability as a result (all the vibe-designed security layers are constantly getting in my way).

It’s not impressive. He’s a celebrity. Celebrities are not impressive
What? Many celebrities are so specifically because they're impressive. Athletes and musicians being the two most obvious examples.
Not this one.
_yawn_ I keep hearing "hype vision". What part of openclaw is hype? It literally works and the adoption has gotten better.

We really need better standards for disagreement.

Every part of it is hype, because it does nothing useful.
Plenty of people find it useful, but maybe it's not useful for you
What is a standard for a disagreement?
If you review the openclaw release schedule and code output you will see that yes, he was. I’m not saying you’ll like what you see, but the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.
With a lot of these AI tools yea, they release very often. But half the features they add aren't even that useful. They just add shit because they can and they introduce bugs and change behaviour all the time.

Opencode has the same problems. They often do multiple releases of that app a day, yet within the span of a week or two I have had to update my config because some random change has altered the behaviour and my permissions broke. Or I've noticed the way the app renders is suddenly different.

Yet, my day to day usage has barely changed since the version I installed last year. It's like everything changes but nothing changes.

Even claude code has this happen, though perhaps to a lesser extent. I'm getting really tired of having new bugs pop up on me or subtle behavior change near daily that requires me to change things. The most annoying thing ever that was just introduced is a giant spew of context mode crap that Claude aggressively adds to every CLAUDE.md file, and I can't find a way to turn it off. I just have to `git checkout CLAUDE.md` repeatedely right now. If I have to add a bash alias to work around your annoying bug, that's pretty bad.
I read the OpenClaw subreddit for comedy. Every release just floods of posts about how everything is constantly broken and people stoping using it because of how broken it is.
Thats the single reason it is faster. Just pushing to prod whatever.

All projects can become fast if they drop guardrails.

This does not correlate with productivity increase

I just looked at and you weren't kidding. There are significant changes every few minutes 24/7.

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commits/main/

GitHub insights over the last week.

Excluding merges, 216 authors have pushed 5864 commits to main and 6568 commits to all branches.

On main, 6965 files have changed and there have been 418,110 additions and 126,691 deletions.

In one month Peter makes 12k commits. So he is spending about $100 per commit depending on how much other stuff is going on.

That means he spends about

That's a metric for management to pump AI if I've ever seen one.
> the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.

That doesn't sound very positive to me...

Oh I agree. They’ve said LTS is coming, that will be a relief. I wonder what “LTS” means in this context. Monthly? I’d settle for just not randomly dying on point version updates to config files TBF
It’s clearly also faster than its developers can handle.
It's fast for sure. But not 5 years of dev time compressed into 30 days fast.
I am not joking when I say this, if you pay me 1.3 million dollars today, I will get so much more done with just a single 200$ codex sub in 30 days than he has in 30 days, I can promise you that.

I just checked the code and feature outputs, and I can build all that in 15 days, for 1.3M USD. Fuck I would do it for 1M...

Scratch that, if it's 300K then sure I could do the same too, if you paid me that for 30 days of work. Lmao, the quality and the feature volume is just not worth anything worth paying so much money for.

I am not saying this because I don't like LLMs or I may think that AI coding can't work, but folks whatever openclaw has built for that much money is not worth nearly that much money...

I don't understand. Are you saying you're capable of building a rival to Openclaw in a few days, but you're just choosing not to? That's amazing.
everyone can build toys. Most people just have enough shame about publishing it.

The hard part is not building such toys, it's the convincing people with money to buy said toy. This is where he earned his applause.

Plenty of people can build an OpenClaw rival. Making it viral, however, is a different skill.
I assume there is already bunch of openclaw rivals, so why bother? Its not like they all become super popular and get bought by openai.
His restraint alone is commandable.
Yes, because doing things 12x faster is extremely valuable. How much do you think companies would pay to do things 12x faster? Your competitors take a year to ship a feature that you can ship in a month
Generating 12x the amount of code/commits/releases isn't a useful metric. That could just as easily be 12x more code to maintain or iterations needed to get it working. Products are measured by the value they provide, not by the resources it cost to create them.