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«Today, even a poorly written prompt
beats the more prepared colleague.”
Antonio Civita, MAKE PROGRESS with OKRs
If you’re hiring, or growing your career, know that the CV is dead.
When someone is looking for a salesperson, a marketing manager, or a developer, what they really want to know isn’t where they worked before. They want to know, ” Can this person solve the problem I’m having today in my company?”
A CV doesn’t answer that question.
But a project, does.
82 days to go from a side project to working for OpenAI
November 2025. Peter Steinberger, an Austrian engineer, builds an app in a weekend. An open-source AI agent that installs on your computer, runs locally, and you control it from WhatsApp. You text it, “Book me a flight to Florence tomorrow,” and it searches for the flight, fills out the forms, and sends you the ticket in PDF format. From your computer, without external servers.
An AI that does things instead of chatting.
Two months later: 2 million users . 140,000 stars on GitHub. The homepage of TechCrunch , Reuters , Bloomberg , Forbes . People were buying Mac Minis specifically to run them 24/7.
The project crashed, saved API keys in plain text, and had serious security holes. Cisco called it a “security nightmare.” It didn’t matter: it showed a path no one had yet charted, imperfections included.
On February 14, 2026, Sam Altman hired him to build the next generation of personal agents at OpenAI.
Steinberger didn’t send a resume. He didn’t interview. He built the product OpenAI hadn’t yet imagined , in a weekend, and gave it away for free.
OpenAI didn’t find it by searching for candidates. It found it because the whole world was already using what he’d built.
The bar has been raised, for everyone
Steinberger had already sold his first company, PSPDFKit, for $116 million. It had 60 employees and clients like Apple, Dropbox, and IBM. It was built from scratch, without venture capital, as a side project. OpenClaw follows the same pattern. His career isn’t a sequence of roles. It’s a sequence of projects. Every project is the CV for the next.
There’s something deeper in this story: the company is changing shape . Until yesterday, it was a group of people who depended on their salary to survive, and the hierarchy made sense: the employee needed the company as much as the company needed him.
But today, if one person can build a product in two days that 2 million people want to use, the question for anyone working in the middle is: why should they work for anyone?
Offering “security” isn’t enough to make a company attractive: it must offer a mission. Steinberger doesn’t need OpenAI to survive; it already has 2 million users. OpenAI attracted him with the scale of the problem.
Skills or agency?
OpenClaw is a project born with vibe coding. Steinberger is an expert engineer, but 99% of OpenClaw’s code, as he himself said , wasn’t written by him. The AI wrote it. He directed the process: he defined what to build, how it should work, what problems to solve. The AI wrote the code. In a weekend.
Today, skills aren’t built through years of study and sweat. You dump them.
OpenClaw had an open marketplace, ClawHub , with hundreds of ready-to-use “skills.” Think of skills as apps for your AI agent: you install one, and it can do a job it couldn’t do before. Manage email, book flights, organize calendars, update a CRM. You download them, activate them, and your agent does the work.
Operational skills are becoming a plug-in. If you’re hiring, the question I encourage you to ask yourself is no longer “Does this person know how to do the job?” But does this person have the agency to decide what work should be done?
Gian Segato, founding engineer of Replit, in his piece “Agency is eating the world” gives a precise name to this shift : agency , the disposition to act without waiting for permission, without waiting for instructions, without waiting to be ready.
For years, you hired people for their specialized skills, because acquiring them required years of study. That barrier created value. AI has eroded it. What used to require months of training and a team of professionals is now available with a $20 subscription. Technical skills are becoming a commodity. What you can’t download is the ability to see a problem, formulate the solution, and orchestrate the execution.
When even “know-how” becomes something you can delegate to a machine, the selection criteria changes: you no longer look for those who know how to do it, you look for those who decide to do it.
In my last newsletter, I wrote that AI will reverse the order of automation: it will hit managers first, then operations. Steinberger is proof of this. A single person covers the entire stack: he sees the problem, designs, builds, and brings it to market. With no one in between to translate. Not because he knows how to do it all, but because he decided to.
The next time you evaluate a candidate, ask yourself: are they demonstrating skills or agency ? And the next time you pitch your company to a talent with high agency, ask yourself: are you offering them a salary or a problem worth solving?
The best way to get chosen is not to apply.
It’s building something that makes it impossible to be ignored.
Instead of a CV, send a link to something that works.
If you want to know exactly what OpenClaw was, how it exploded in 82 days, and why it was also a security disaster (and why it had to be renamed), I’ve written it all at the bottom of this newsletter.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ●↑
Antonio
PS: If you’re building a company made up of people who move independently, the challenge is keeping everyone aligned in the same direction while each works independently. MAKE PROGRESS® is the system that connects strategy and execution, with OKRs and measurable KPIs, in 12 weeks.
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Profile: Who is Steinberger and what is OpenClaw?
The character
Peter Steinberger is an Austrian software engineer. He studied computer science at the Technical University of Vienna, where he also taught iOS development.
In 2011, he founded PSPDFKit as a side project: an SDK for managing PDFs on iOS. He grew it without a cent of venture capital to 60 employees, with clients including Apple, Dropbox, and IBM. In 2021, it sold to Insight Partners for approximately $116 million.
After the sale, he took a break. In 2025, he returned to construction, launching over 40 experimental AI projects.
What was OpenClaw (explained simply)
OpenClaw is an open-source software that turns an AI model (like ChatGPT or Claude) into a real personal assistant: not one that chats, but one that does things .
It installs on your computer. You chat with it on WhatsApp or Telegram like you would with a friend. Say, “Book me a flight to Florence tomorrow,” and it searches for the flight, fills out the forms, confirms the booking, and sends you the ticket in PDF format. All from your computer, without going through external servers.
Features that made it unique:
- Memory: It remembered your preferences, contexts, routines. It became “your AI,” different from anyone else’s.
- He acted in the real world: he browsed websites, filled out forms, read and wrote files, executed commands
- Automations: you could tell him “every evening at 7pm book me a dinner and send me the summary of the emails” and he would do it by himself
- Multi-channel: worked on WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, Slack, iMessage
- Local-first: All data remained on your computer. Privacy by default.
Steinberger described it as “AI that actually does things”, not “AI that only chats”.
The history of the name (and the problems with Anthropic)
The project started out as Clawdbot , a pun inspired by Claude Code’s mascot (a lobster). The tech community loved it.
In late January 2026, Anthropic (the company that makes Claude) “gently forced” the name change due to trademark concerns. Steinberger wrote on X: “Forced by Anthropic. Wasn’t my decision.”
The name first became Moltbot , then OpenClaw .
Meanwhile, crypto traders had created a meme coin called “Clawd,” and the name change sparked online harassment. Steinberger had to publicly ask traders to stop.
Fun fact: the project relied heavily on Claude’s API (produced by Anthropic), so the tension was paradoxical. The company that provided the brains of the project was the same one that disputed its name.
The viral boom
The numbers, in sequence:
- November 2025: Weekend Hack on GitHub
- Late January 2026: Viral explosion on X, Reddit, YouTube
- 140,000 stars on GitHub
- 2 million users in one week
- Mac Mini sales boomed (people bought them to run OpenClaw 24/7)
- Birth of Moltbook, a kind of social network for AI agents
- Birth of the “Clawd” meme coin
- 42,000+ applications submitted online
Why did it explode? Setup took minutes, cost zero (aside from the AI APIs), and concrete proof that a local, autonomous AI agent actually worked.
The controversies
Security: the biggest problem. OpenClaw gave AI nearly unlimited access to the computer: it could execute commands, read files, and browse the web. There were no built-in security barriers.
The numbers are shocking: of the 42,665 public instances found online in January 2026, 93% had no protection whatsoever . API keys were stored in clear text. A real vulnerability (CVE-2026-25253) allowed credentials to be stolen via prompt injection.
Cisco called it a “security nightmare.” Jamf published an analysis of insider threat risks .
Technical instability: The project was rough. Gateways crashed, bots lost context and reverted to simple chat behavior, dependencies on specific versions of Node.js, corrupted files.
These weren’t minor bugs. They were signs that the project wasn’t ready for production.
But that’s precisely the point: OpenClaw didn’t win because it was perfect. It won because it showed a path no one had yet charted. Bugs, flaws, and instabilities included.
As Steinberger wrote: It wasn’t a finished product. It was a demo of a possible future.
Hiring at OpenAI
On February 14, 2026, Sam Altman announced Steinberger’s joining OpenAI.
The mission: to develop “the next generation of personal agents,” with access to OpenAI’s most advanced models to make them safe and accessible. Steinberger’s words: “I want to build an agent my mom can use.”
Altman called him “a genius with amazing ideas about interacting intelligent agents.”
OpenClaw has moved to an independent open-source foundation, financially supported by OpenAI.
From weekend hack to hiring: 82 days.
