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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

> 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)

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> vibecoded without reading any of the code

Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?

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

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.

> 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?

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.

>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.