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OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

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Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#181

Post by lxgr »

Iolaum wrote: post #78
wiseowise wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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).

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#182

Post by coffeefirst »

lxgr wrote: post #177
cedws wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s ambitious about it? It’s a chatbot that glues APIs together.

The ambitious idea is actually giving a chatbot/agent access to a bunch of personal data and having it self-modify its harness and context to some extent. The execution in case of Openclaw is a hot mess.

I believe this is sometimes called The Lethal Trifecta.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#183

Post by lxgr »

vessenes wrote: post #14
zxornand wrote: post #5

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.

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.

It’s clearly also faster than its developers can handle.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#184

Post by shepherdjerred »

lxgr wrote: post #175
vntok wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?

The idea is lean, the execution is slop.

I wonder if compilers were ever considered 'slop'

If these methods prove successful it isn't going to matter. A user doesn't care if code is 'slop' or artisanal, so long as the app/site/whatever works.

If you can combine autonomous flows (and millions of dollars in tokens) to produce work comparable to a traditional engineering team, then why would the user care which wrote the app/site/whatever?

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#185

Post by shepherdjerred »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #53
Robdel12 wrote: post #39

Once you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792 I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.

But it's a self fulfilling prophecy. They need all this stuff because it's a vibe coded app where bugs are randomly introduced, the architecture is overcomplicated and sucks, and stuff is just added for the fun of it. Do existing companies run entire end-to-end product integration tests on every single change they make to a repo to make sure something hasn't broken? No, they just architect things in a way such that a…

> How did we do it? With lessons learned from the past 5 decades of professional software development experience.

Yes, that is _exactly_ the problem that is being solved. Is it easier to spin up some LLMs or pay a team of experienced engineers?

As inference costs fall, which will be cheaper?

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#186

Post by shepherdjerred »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #140
simianwords wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_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

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#187

Post by cyanydeez »

Peacefulz wrote: post #149
therealpygon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey guys, I’m super good at using tokens. Business: Amazing, that’s great what did you do? I ran 50 instances and had them all fix the same bugs at the same time and then analyzed the results of all 50 runs to have AI score each of the attempts, then sort them, then compare them to each other in a round robin tournament style double elimination to ensure I got the best result. Then I had AI convert this into a skill,…

This is the best use of tokens I've ever read. I'm building this skill as we speak to use on our Enterprise Claude account. Wish me luck on a raise!

Claude, somewhere in this codebase I've mispelled a common word; the word is also a homophone and further, is easily confused with another word that has three r's; please start up a subagent for each file and count the r's and verify how many r's there are's; if there's three, then make sure to review potential homophones and check that I've spelt the correct worrrd incorrectly correct.

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#188

Post by overfeed »

lbrito wrote: post #160
namenotrequired wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it misleading if this would be the consumer's cost? Because it does not say “equivalent of”, it literally says he spent money that he did not spend

If anything it cost more than the title, because customer costs are wildly subsidized. So yeah its misleading but in the other direction.

Inference is highly marked up. Total costs including training may be subsidized (,in a sense since the AI companies are widely reported to not break even as yet)

Re: OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days

#189

Post by overfeed »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #184
lxgr wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is lean, the execution is slop.

I wonder if compilers were ever considered 'slop' If these methods prove successful it isn't going to matter. A user doesn't care if code is 'slop' or artisanal, so long as the app/site/whatever works. If you can combine autonomous flows (and millions of dollars in tokens) to produce work comparable to a traditional engineering team, then why would the user care which wrote the app/site/whatever?

If.
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