[tabs_or_spaces]

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.

[erikbye]

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.

[latexr]

> 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

[ho_schi]

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.

    Restart braking to brake because our code failed.

Or.

    One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!

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.

    But I’m only programming a text viewer.

Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.

[Balinares]

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.)

[Fervicus]

> 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.

[pnt12]

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.

[Flere-Imsaho]

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.

[mdavid626]

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.

[johnebgd]

I’ve met many more $5M/year “SaaS” entrepreneurs who built a Wordpress plugin than a custom SaaS platform. Your point is well made.

[yobbo]

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.

[democracy]

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.

[killbot5000]

> 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.

[DeusExMachina]

> 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.

[LMYahooTFY]

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.

[cookiengineer]

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.

[networkcat]

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

[antfarm]

> 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.

[groundtruthdev]

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.

[kamaal]

>>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.

[amelius]

> you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products

Huh, if you make finished products you better start your own company.

[weinzierl]

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.

[bilekas]

> 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.

[abm53]

> 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.

[collimarco]

> 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.

[coldtea]

>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.

[asveikau]

> 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.

[ljm]

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.

[chamomeal]

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

[jorvi]

> 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.

[1000xcat]

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)

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

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."

[m000]

> 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.

[almostdeadguy]

Yeah you’re right, the engagement factories probably don’t care about code quality. The customer isn’t the customer after all.

[lbrito]

>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

[dinkumthinkum]

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.

[skywalqer]

You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?

[wasmainiac]

> 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.

[yaku_brang_ja]

This is so not true.

[oytis]

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.

[robotpepi]

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.

[conartist6]

...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

[getoffit]

> 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

[cube00]

> 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.

[jrowen]

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.

[sph]

pets.com moment

[catwell]

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.

[deanc]

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.

[debugnik]

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.

[westonplatter0]

He also spent 13 years building [an] OCR document engine company (PSPDFKit) before becoming an "overnight" vibe coder success story.

[indemnity]

His PDF toolkit was pretty solid and high quality if you were in the iOS space.

He’s not just a “vibe coder”.

[conradev]

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.

[BoggleFiend]

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...

[loandbehold]

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.

[stingraycharles]

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.

[h14h]

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.

[enieslobby]

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.

[imjonse]

> a project that people want,

do many people actually use openclaw (a two week old project IIUC) or is it just hyped up?

[pjmlp]

I bet they did not invert a binary tree on the whiteboard, nor answered how many golf balls fit into a plane.

[tin7in]

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.

[mattmanser]

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.

[sauercrowd]

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.

[jonmc12]

Also surprised; building something people want and proving it is the unlock. HN first principle since the beginning.

[ryanar]

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.

[bhaak]

If you just commit AI generated code without even looking at it it doesn't matter how many years of engineering experience you have.

[mvkel]

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.

[spaceman_2020]

Going by how insanely viral OpenClaw has been on X, I don’t think any of the stars were bought

[bananaboy]

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.

[imiric]

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.

[elAhmo]

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.

[baby]

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)

[thecupisblue]

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.

[figassis]

You don't get hired for any of that. OpenAI did not hire him because he went viral. Virality brought something interesting to OpenAI's attention. And they thought they could use this product idea/vision/execution, GTM strategy, whatever, and because it didn't seem like OAI had anyone on their team capable of this, they hired him.

Simple as that. Don't feel jealous, trying to replicate won't work, he did not know he'd be hired, he built something that he found interesting, and then realized it would be interesting to a lot more people.

The way to reach success is to either be strategically consistent in a way that maximizes luck surface area but does not depend on it, or to be unexpectedly lucky. The latter is gambling, People win the lottery regularly, does not mean you should make that your mission.

Be comfortable with not being the one to hit gold. And yes, it's ok to be jealous. Take a moment and then go back and enjoy the rest of your life.

Finally, there are a lot of companies that would likely hire you, hoping to hit gold. But you are likely filtering them out because they're not tech/large/startupy enough for you. These companies are wondering what they need to attract talent like you.

[hmokiguess]

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.

[FreeRadical]

Read his backstory. He’s a high quality software engineer by background.

[qingcharles]

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...

[AlexCoventry]

He didn't even have to be the one buying them. Lots of people benefit from a tool like OpenClaw getting popular.

[rippeltippel]

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.

[anilakar]

> 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.

[alberto467]

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.

[sathish316]

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

[BryantD]

The bit about purchased stars and followers is a bit out of left field. Is there a piece of news I missed?

[jrowen]

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.

[democracy]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[column]

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.

[imjonse]

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.

[giancarlostoro]

> 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.

[chillacy]

Boris has been very open about the 100% AI code writing rate and my own experience matches. If you have a typescript or common codebase, once you set your processes up correctly (you have tests / verification, you have a CLAUDE or AGENTS.md that you always add learnings to, you add skill files as you find repeatable tasks, you have automated code review), its not hard to achieve this.

Then the human touch points become coming up with what to build, reviewing the eng plans of the AI, and increasingly light code review of the underlying code, focusing on overall architectural decisions and only occasionally intervening to clean things up (again with AI)

[wasmainiac]

> 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.

[throwaway2037]

    > way too many kids want to grow up to be ... YouTubers

What's wrong with wanting to be a YouTuber? At this point, it's really a very small TV channel. And YouTube essentially allows for an infinite number of these very small TV channels, unlike traditional TV.

    > way too many kids want to grow up to be influencers

You can replace "influencers" with "wanting to be popular". That is as old as time. 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.

[Kiro]

> 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.

[LtWorf]

As if newspapers never did paid promotion articles?

[nedt]

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.

[re5i5tor]

I shared a lot of these uninformed (speaking only for myself) opinions, but have a lot more respect for Peter after listening to his recent 3hr interview with Lex Fridman. I came away liking and respecting.

[closewith]

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.

[Traubenfuchs]

That wasn‘t true before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15713801

[nasmorn]

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.

[Ultimatt]

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.

[mempko]

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?

[koe123]

In my view this is just an aquihire to get a headline and take ownership over this trend. Yet another pivot to build hype.

[shin_lao]

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.

[wanderingmind]

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

[neop1x]

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.

[antfarm]

>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.

[throw444420394]

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.

[philipallstar]

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.

[secbear]

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

[powerapple]

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.

[danmaz74]

> vibecoded without reading any of the code

Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?

[j45]

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.

[PurpleRamen]

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.

[blueblazin]

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?

[jstummbillig]

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.

[buschleague]

This isn't a surprise at all. I sat down with the dev team at OpenAI during dev day last year and the biggest shocker to me: these "kids" are over here vibe coding the whole damn thing.

[Aperocky]

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.

[gadders]

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.

[haebom]

Would you like to have it removed? https://github.com/oswarld/openshears

[svnt]

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.

[skeptic_ai]

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.

[girvo]

> 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.

[DivingForGold]

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 ?

[ass22]

Because he wanted to say "Take that" To anthropic who forced Pete to change the name of the product.

[runjake]

> 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?

[nb777]

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.

[imtringued]

It's also from a guy who rebranded three times (Clawdbot, Moltbot, OpenClaw) in a row and this is technically his fourth rebrand.

[motbus3]

I think it is unfortunate that this is happening. After all the mishaps and wrongdoings I don't want see anyone joining openai

[chvid]

Maybe think of this as a hiring of a marketer and tech influencer. And someone with the chops to create a viral product.

[jimmydoe]

Exactly.

If AI companies believe code generate by it self, people to scaling up sales is the only worth hire.

[seydor]

I'm more jealous of his muscles and butt

[bjourne]

Props for admitting jealousy and for being honest! I often feel the same way when fixing bugs in others code.

[bluerooibos]

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.

[b3lvedere]

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.

[teekert]

It’s not the code. It’s the vision and the can-do attitude. And perhaps a bit of the (earned) name.

[swiftcoder]

> 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...

[morningsam]

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.

[seanoreillyza]

Do good or at least useful work in public and you'd be surprised at what can happen.

[123malware321]

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.

[turtlebro]

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.

[tom_m]

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.

[ass22]

Im working on a project to change this.

Funny that you mention 'real people'. There are a number of components that sit at the core of what Im building - it should allow you to have the time and reach to vet more (100% verified) candidates than you ever could before. I also want to reduce the explicit costs of hiring so that firms can hire more people.

[eviks]

> 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?

[CobrastanJorji]

> 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.

[edstarch]

Such is life in the attention economy.

[qmr]

> 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?

[jv22222]

The billion dollar homepage.

[thorio]

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.

[Danidada]

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?

[elwatto]

nah. focus on building cool things people want.

[aerhardt]

> 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.

[ookblah]

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.

[citizenpaul]

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.

[malthaus]

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

[dinkumthinkum]

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?

[dns_snek]

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.

[21asdffdsa12]

One day Atlas may shrug, but not today, atlast..

[NuclearPM]

What the heck is “softwares”?

[benreesman]

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.