It’s impressive someone early in their career shipped this. There seems to be a stark increase in high-quality AI/data projects from early-career engineers lately and I'm super curious what’s driving that (and honestly speaking: a little jealous).
It’s impressive someone early in their career shipped this. There seems to be a stark increase in high-quality AI/data projects from early-career engineers lately and I'm super curious what’s driving that (and honestly speaking: a little jealous).
Sometimes experience (or more so the wisdom you've accumulated over a long career) creates mental blocks / preconceptions about risks or problems you foresee, which makes it harder to approach big scary problems if you're able to anticipate all of the challenges you're likely to hit.
Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
The most meaningful technical advances I've personally seen always started out as "let's just do it, it will only take a weekend" and then 2 years later, you find yourself with a finished product. (If you knew it would take 2 years from the start, you might have never bothered)
Naivety isn't always a bad thing.
> Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
My favorite story in CS related to this is how Huffman Coding came to be [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding#History
This is so incredibly accurate. I see all these side projects people are spinning up and can't help but think "Sure it might work at first but the first time i have to integrate it with something else i'll have to spend a week trying to get them to work. Hell that'll probably require an annoying rewrite and its not even worth what I get out of it"
If you started your career more than ~2-3 years ago, you were trained on a completely different game. Clear abstractions, ownership, careful iteration, all that. That muscle memory is actively hindering you; preventing you from succeeding.
The people coming up now don't have that baggage. They never internalized "write the code yourself" as the default. They think in terms of spawning systems, letting things run, checking outcomes. It's way closer to managing a process than engineering in the traditional sense. And yeah, that shows up in what gets shipped. A 21-year-old will brute force 20 directions in parallel with agents and just pick what works. Someone more "experienced" will spend that same time trying to design the "right" approach up front. By the time they're done thinking, the other person has already iterated past them.
It's kind of unsettling is how basically all of these "senior instincts" are now liabilities. Caring about perfect structure, being allergic to randomness, needing to understand every layer before moving forward, etc. used to be strengths. Now they just slow you down.
You can already feel the split forming. Younger builders are comfortable letting systems do things they don't fully understand. Senior engineers keep trying to pull everything back into something legible and controlled, kneecapping themselves. That gap is not small.
What I'm seeing in my circle of founders and CEOs is that they're slowly laying off these older devs (cutoff age is around 24yrs) and replacing them with fresh, young talent, better suited for this new agentic era. From their reports the velocity gains are insane; and it compounds. Basically, these older folks are still doing polynomial thinking in an exponential landscape. They are dinosaurs slated for extinction.
Software development keeps going through YOLO->Engineering cycles, and the non-technical business folks are ALWAYS overindexing on the swing, in each direction, while the real pros are trying to navigate the new to find how to best leverage the power of new tooling without abandoning correctness while dealing with the expectations of people with power that far outstrips their comprehension of the domain.
There are four "people" that contributes (https://github.com/NVIDIA/NemoClaw/graphs/contributors) judging by the git commits and the GitHub authors, none of them seem to be novices at programming, what made you write what you wrote here?
I think he's talking about the original claw, Open Claw
How is Peter "early in their career"? When he sold PSPDFKit for 100mio in 2020 he had been working on it for 13 years, and before that he'd worked as an engineer.
OpenClaw? The one started by a person that sold his previous company and got >$100M ? I wouldn't call him a novice either.
A lot of senior engineering problems aren't gated by experience but by being trusted to coordinate large numbers of juniors.
Now that as a junior, I can spin up a team of AIs and delegate, I can tackle a bunch of senior level tasks if I'm good at coordination.
I think this is a fundamentally flawed perspective on the role and experience of a senior. It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers. The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
> It's a managers role to coordinate junior engineers.
Due to AI this is now my job. My company is hiring less juniors, but the ones we do hire are given more scope and coordination responsibilities since otherwise we'd just be LLM wrappers.
> The difference between junior and senior is knowing where and when to do what at an increasing scale as you gain experience.
Many juniors believe they know what to do. And want to immediately take on yuge projects.
e.g. I decided I want to rewrite my whole codebase in C++20 modules for compile time.
Prior to AI, I wouldn't be given help for this refactor so it wouldn't happen.
Now I just delegate to AI and convert my codebase to modules in just a few days!
At that point I discovered Clang 18 wasn't really optimized for modules and they actually increased build time. If I had more experience I could've predicted using half-baked C++ features is a bad idea.
That being said, every once in a while one of my stupid ideas actually pays off.
e.g. I made a parallel AI agent code review workflow a few months ago back when everyone was doing single agent reviews. The seniors thought it was a dumb idea to reinvent the wheel when we had AI code review already, but it only took a day or two to make the prototype.
Turns out reinventing the wheel was extremely effective for our team. It reduced mean time-to-merge by 20%!
This was because we had too many rules (several hundred, due to cooperative multitasking) for traditional AI code reviewers. Parallel agents prevented the rules from overwhelming the context.
But at the time, I just thought parallel agents were cool because I read the Gas Town blog and wasn't thinking about "do we have any unique circumstances that require us to build something internally?"
Neurons that fire together, wire together. Your brain optimizes for your environment over time. As we get older, our brains are running in a more optimized way than when we're younger. That's why older hunters are more effective than younger hunters. They're finely tuned for their environment. It's an evolutionary advantage. But it also means that they're not firing in "novel" ways as much as the "kids". "kids" are more creative I think because their brains are still adopting, exploring novelty, neuron connections aren't as deeply tied together yet.
This is also maybe one of the biggest pitfalls as our society get's "older" with more old people, and less "kids". We need kids to force us to do things differently.
> It’s impressive someone early in their career shipped this.
Hang on, what's impressive about this?
Not 100% sure this isn't sarcasm, but I'll bite.
For me (a non-early career dev) these projects terrify me. People build stuff that just seem like enormous liabilities relying on tools mostly controlled and gate kept by someone else. My intuition tells me something is off. I could be wrong about it all, but one thing I've learned over the years is that ignoring my intuition typically doesn't end well!
What is impressive about this project? It seems to be similar to other projects in that space.
Should be obvious that its tools like Claude Code. If you are a junior dev not experienced in delivering entire products but with good ideas you have incredible leverage now...
OpenClaw is many things, but decidedly not "high-quality".
because the floor is fucking insane for junior developers right now!!