OpenClaw’s creator says the vibes of “vibe coding” are bad — and he doesn’t appreciate the dismissive undertones of the term.
The viral agent OpenClaw is a product of AI code editors. The developer behind it, Peter Steinberger, used OpenAI’s Codex to build it. Its original name, Clawdbot, referenced Claude Code.
One term has emerged to describe this type of work: vibe coding, or prompting AI to generate code. On OpenAI’s “Builders Unscripted,” Steinberger said he wasn’t a fan of the phrase.
“There are these people that write software the old way, and the old way is going to go away,” Steinberger said. “They call it ‘vibe coding.’ I think vibe coding is a slur.”
What’s wrong with the term is that it implies ease, he said.
“They don’t understand that it’s a skill,” Steinberger said, analogizing coding with AI to learning to play guitar.
Other industry leaders have signaled frustration with the term. Former Google Brain scientist Andrew Ng called it “unfortunate” and “misleading.” Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI head who coined the term, now thinks “agentic engineering” is the future.
While Steinberger may not be a fan of the term, the use of vibe coding exploded throughout 2025. Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year.
If AI coding is like playing the guitar, then Steinberger has all his chords down. His interviewer, OpenAI’s Romain Huet, asked Steinberger whether he still ships code without reading it.
“Most code is boring,” Steinberger said. “I have a pretty good understanding of what it writes.”
One thing that helped Steinberger be a good AI coder: being a manager in the past.
“I led a team before,” Steinberger said. “I had a lot of software engineers under me. That also required accepting that they will not write exactly the same code that I want.”
Before creating OpenClaw, Steinberger founded PSPDFKit. He’s since had interactions with most major AI labs. Anthropic asked him to rename his chatbot. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reached out with his experiences from testing it, Steinberger said.
Zuckerberg also courted him for a potential job, but OpenAI beat him out, with Steinberger accepting its job offer earlier this month. Sam Altman called him a “genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents.”
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