If you started your career more than ~2-3 years ago, you were trained on a completely different game. Clear abstractions, ownership, careful iteration, all that. That muscle memory is actively hindering you; preventing you from succeeding.

The people coming up now don't have that baggage. They never internalized "write the code yourself" as the default. They think in terms of spawning systems, letting things run, checking outcomes. It's way closer to managing a process than engineering in the traditional sense. And yeah, that shows up in what gets shipped. A 21-year-old will brute force 20 directions in parallel with agents and just pick what works. Someone more "experienced" will spend that same time trying to design the "right" approach up front. By the time they're done thinking, the other person has already iterated past them.

It's kind of unsettling is how basically all of these "senior instincts" are now liabilities. Caring about perfect structure, being allergic to randomness, needing to understand every layer before moving forward, etc. used to be strengths. Now they just slow you down.

You can already feel the split forming. Younger builders are comfortable letting systems do things they don't fully understand. Senior engineers keep trying to pull everything back into something legible and controlled, kneecapping themselves. That gap is not small.

What I'm seeing in my circle of founders and CEOs is that they're slowly laying off these older devs (cutoff age is around 24yrs) and replacing them with fresh, young talent, better suited for this new agentic era. From their reports the velocity gains are insane; and it compounds. Basically, these older folks are still doing polynomial thinking in an exponential landscape. They are dinosaurs slated for extinction.

Sometimes experience (or more so the wisdom you've accumulated over a long career) creates mental blocks / preconceptions about risks or problems you foresee, which makes it harder to approach big scary problems if you're able to anticipate all of the challenges you're likely to hit.

Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.

The most meaningful technical advances I've personally seen always started out as "let's just do it, it will only take a weekend" and then 2 years later, you find yourself with a finished product. (If you knew it would take 2 years from the start, you might have never bothered)

Naivety isn't always a bad thing.

There are four "people" that contributes (https://github.com/NVIDIA/NemoClaw/graphs/contributors) judging by the git commits and the GitHub authors, none of them seem to be novices at programming, what made you write what you wrote here?

A lot of senior engineering problems aren't gated by experience but by being trusted to coordinate large numbers of juniors.

Now that as a junior, I can spin up a team of AIs and delegate, I can tackle a bunch of senior level tasks if I'm good at coordination.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. Your brain optimizes for your environment over time. As we get older, our brains are running in a more optimized way than when we're younger. That's why older hunters are more effective than younger hunters. They're finely tuned for their environment. It's an evolutionary advantage. But it also means that they're not firing in "novel" ways as much as the "kids". "kids" are more creative I think because their brains are still adopting, exploring novelty, neuron connections aren't as deeply tied together yet.

This is also maybe one of the biggest pitfalls as our society get's "older" with more old people, and less "kids". We need kids to force us to do things differently.

Not 100% sure this isn't sarcasm, but I'll bite.

For me (a non-early career dev) these projects terrify me. People build stuff that just seem like enormous liabilities relying on tools mostly controlled and gate kept by someone else. My intuition tells me something is off. I could be wrong about it all, but one thing I've learned over the years is that ignoring my intuition typically doesn't end well!

> It’s impressive someone early in their career shipped this.

Hang on, what's impressive about this?

OpenClaw is many things, but decidedly not "high-quality".

What is impressive about this project? It seems to be similar to other projects in that space.

Should be obvious that its tools like Claude Code. If you are a junior dev not experienced in delivering entire products but with good ideas you have incredible leverage now...

because the floor is fucking insane for junior developers right now!!