On AI engineering as a slot machine
Peter Steinberger is the creator of OpenClaw, and for me he is a genuinely fascinating case study. He had already built and sold his company. He burned out in 2021 and spent three years without touching a computer. AI gave him back a spark for programming, and he went from one extreme to the completely the other.
Now he is totally addicted to coding and dedicates his entire week to it. His GitHub profile shows commits every single day, hundreds of them, clearly the product of vibe-coding, since that volume requires fairly regular human supervision regardless of AI assistance.
In his articles he writes about having communities with people who share this same addiction, and how 80-hour weeks are becoming increasingly common in today's startups. He even mentions having built tools to control AI and his agents from his phone, something he describes, without irony, as a drug. He acknowledges he is doing it wrong. He acknowledges it is not healthy.
And this is precisely what leads me to a reflection I find difficult to set aside: AI, which was supposedly going to take work away from us, is making everyone work more. It seems that the fewer barriers we have to creating things, the more addicted to creating things we become. Before, at least, we had certain limits on the dopamine we get from building. Now that it is increasingly easy, our brains become hooked on the act of creation itself. He is genuinely unhappy when he is not building something. It is also a bit of what happens when you accumulate more tools: the more tools you have, the more possibilities open up, and the more possibilities there are, the more things you feel you need to cover.
So, having artificial intelligence to build things will not just give us far more possibilities. It will also make us compete in an increasingly unhealthy way to create them. Paradoxically, this could be the opposite of what we expected: people addicted to working, addicted to building, addicted to using ever more powerful tools, triggering a productivity explosion where some go completely off the rails and base their entire identity on developing things and never stopping. You can see it in Peter. You can see it in many others.