OpenClaw Creator: ‘Vibe Coding Is a Slur’

OpenClaw’s creator says the vibes of “vibe coding” are unhealthy — and he does not admire the dismissive undertones of the time period.

The viral agent OpenClaw is a product of AI code editors. The developer behind it, Peter Steinberger, used OpenAI’s Codex to construct it. Its unique title, Clawdbot, referenced Claude Code.

One time period has emerged to explain such a work: vibe coding, or prompting AI to generate code. On OpenAI’s “Builders Unscripted,” Steinberger mentioned he wasn’t a fan of the phrase.

“There are these people who write software program the previous approach, and the previous approach goes to go away,” Steinberger mentioned. “They name it ‘vibe coding.’ I believe vibe coding is a slur.”

What’s improper with the time period is that it implies ease, he mentioned.

“They do not perceive that it is a talent,” Steinberger mentioned, analogizing coding with AI to studying to play guitar.

Different trade leaders have signaled frustration with the time period. Former Google Mind scientist Andrew Ng known as it “unlucky” and “deceptive.” Andrej Karpathy, the previous Tesla AI head who coined the time period, now thinks “agentic engineering” is the long run.

Whereas Steinberger will not be a fan of the time period, using vibe coding exploded all through 2025. Collins Dictionary named it the phrase of the 12 months.

If AI coding is like enjoying the guitar, then Steinberger has all his chords down. His interviewer, OpenAI’s Romain Huet, requested Steinberger whether or not he nonetheless ships code with out studying it.

“Most code is boring,” Steinberger mentioned. “I’ve a reasonably good understanding of what it writes.”

One factor that helped Steinberger be a great AI coder: being a supervisor previously.

“I led a group earlier than,” Steinberger mentioned. “I had loads of software program engineers below me. That additionally required accepting that they won’t write precisely the identical code that I need.”

Earlier than creating OpenClaw, Steinberger based PSPDFKit. He is since had interactions with most main AI labs. Anthropic requested him to rename his chatbot. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reached out together with his experiences from testing it, Steinberger mentioned.

Zuckerberg additionally courted him for a possible job, however OpenAI beat him out, with Steinberger accepting its job provide earlier this month. Sam Altman known as him a “genius with loads of wonderful concepts about the way forward for very sensible brokers.”