Peter Steinberger: What Happens When 4.7 Million People Let It Cook
In a Nutshell
Peter Steinberger built Open Claw from a personal annoyance—wanting to message agents from his phone—into a viral open-source project that hit 4.7 million weekly downloads. The project exploded when he let thousands of people interact with it simultaneously, but the attention nearly broke him as he became responsible for security, support, and endless configuration options. His core lesson: stay focused on what annoys you personally, keep building fun, and resist feature creep—because when you stop using your own product, the project stops improving.
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Six months ago, Peter Steinberger was positioned as the future, but he was mocked by an anime girl. He receives daily questions that he usually ignores or answers with a media-friendly response, but today he provides real answers to five questions over 40 minutes.
He references Boris's advice to "let the model cook" and explains that he discovered what happens when tens of thousands of people let it cook simultaneously.
Steinberger explains that while Open Claw is eight months old in human time, it's approximately four years old in AI time. His source of inspiration is usually being annoyed. On a rainy day in November, he was juggling agents while hungry and wanted to send a prompt from his phone to his computer so an agent could check on his other agents.
He references early 2025, when Opus 3.2.5 was the latest model and OpenAI had O3, which was impressive but slow and expensive. He describes getting a dopamine hit when his agent did something right, but now when agents get something wrong, he questions whether he designed the loop wrong, didn't give the agent enough verification tools, has an error in his thinking, or is asking for impossible things.
Steinberger returned from the kitchen to find his coding agent stopped due to something trivial, which annoyed him. He spun up a new terminal session, rambled his idea, and let the model cook. Within an hour, it built him a WhatsApp relay that allowed him to send messages from his Mac to WhatsApp and back.
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