The issue is there’s non linearities involved. Although I don’t know I would use the open claw guy, but let’s take Isaac Newton. You can’t sum up people and arrive at an Isaac Newton worth of talent. He’s singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did. There were others similarly outsized in their ability to change things, and there are today as well. But you can’t funge talent at some level with more people - in fact as we know there’s a rapidly diminishing return on people investment.

Finally in some ways agentic workflows magnify the power of the individual who is adept at harnessing them, they don’t have to argue (much) with the agents to effect their ideas. I’ve found a lot of very bright engineers spend their days fighting to be heard by managers and peers who can’t / won’t understand them. By unshackling them from trying to debate down idiots, they deliver way way more, and of the right things, than they otherwise could have.

| Newton... He's Singular, unique, and irreplaceable at what he did.

Leibniz, literally parallel.

Was Newton just a smart guy at the right place and the right time. These smart folks require other smart folks to understand and verify what they did. There are many who have amazing pedigrees in history.

Both Newton and Leibniz intersected with calculus but had incredibly diverse careers spanning many subjects that were totally orthogonal. So, no, in fact the fact they discovered calculus in very different ways proves the point even further - they were so singular as to arrive at similar breathtaking insights from totally different perspectives totally independently, for the first time in all of mankind. You can’t substitute one for the other, and each was totally indispensable and irreplaceable.

You can replace Newton with Leibniz.

Newton did a lot more than just calculus, you know.

No? This is only true if you assume that Newton’s only notable achievement was the creation of calculus. Newton did far more for physics and classical mechanics than Leibniz. Did Leibniz also discover the universal law of gravitation? Did he match Newton’s prism experiments in some way? In what sense can Newton be replaced by Leibniz?

The $1.3 million doesn't mean much. The article stated he could've switched to a significantly cheaper option and cut the bill to $300k. That's still a lot but since he worked for the company that sells the tokens it isn't as though they were paying the retail cost.

For those who, like me, had to do a double take on that number: https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-peter-steinberger-a...

Yes, $1.3M in token cost in less than 30 days and some days were even off-peak, if you can call it that with that insane scale that likely hides quite a lot of tokens in the lower bars.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159227

I feel like using $1.3M/year is a wild outlier. A $200/month Max sub is a pretty cheap way to get quite a lot of benefit.

His usage is actually 12x that ...

I honestly believe that most Silicon Valley developers could have their pre-AI output replaced by 10 dollars/day in Gemini 3 pay as you go spend.

I don't think existing companies will bite that bullet, but I think you'll see AI native companies in five years with like, a baffling small number of people.

Why in five years? Where are these hyper productive small companies running laps around bigger ones right now?

> Where are these hyper productive small companies running laps around bigger ones right now?

Getting bought by the bigger companies as it is currently the goal of most start-up since no one cares about monopolies and anti competitive behavior nowadays.