You might have read about Clawdbot (no it’s Moltbot, wait now it’s OpenClaw). I’ve tried it, and it’s great, and I’m happy to ramble like a maniac about my experience with it to anyone who’ll listen.
What’s far more interesting to me though is the creator, Peter Steinberger. He’s got an interesting story — he ran a super successful B2B business, PSPDFKit, and burned out and gave it all up and just stopped coding for a few years. I heard him speak at iOS Conf SG a couple of years back, and got the impression he didn’t miss his coding days, as he’d lost the “spark”.
Then came Claude Code mid last year, and he embraced it and found his spark again, and he made so many people (including me) excited about just making things again. And now he seems to have made the agentic assistant that the big companies can’t (maybe not because of ability; more because of constraints) make, and it’s been amazing to watch.
This 2-hour interview video is his story, and I highly recommend it.
Some choice quotes (compiled for me by my OpenClaw bot):
“What blew my mind so much was this realization that I can build everything now. Before you had to really pick which side project you build because software is hard. Yeah, it’s still hard. But now… I’m so good at this technology and so bad at that one, and I’m like ‘oh let’s make the CLI in Go.’ I have no clue about Go. But I have a good system understanding.” — 0:44:15
“There are people who really love to code on hard problems, think about algorithms, don’t really like the ‘I’m building a product’ part… Those are the people who really struggle and often reject AI, because that’s exactly the job where AI excels — it solves the hard problems.” — 0:50:45
“All the mundane stuff of writing code is automated away, I can move so much faster. But I have to think so much more. I’m still very much in the flow. It is completely the same feeling… but it is mentally even more exhausting.” — 0:54:46
“I’m not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI. I mean, they do to a degree, but you have to do a big refactor first, you know — not just on your codebase, but also on your company.” — 1:36:21
“When I get a pull request, I’m actually more interested in the prompts than in the code. I ask people to please add the prompts, and I read the prompts more than I read the code. Because to me this is a way higher signal — how did you get to the solution, what did you actually ask, how much steering was involved.” — 1:48:02
And, my favourite:
“I don’t like the term vibe coding. I tell people what I do is ‘agentic engineering’ with a little star. Vibe coding starts at 3am.” — 0:54:32