Full Interview: Clawdbot’s Peter Steinberger Makes First Public Appearance Since Launch

This is our full interview with Peter Steinberger, his first public appearance since launching Clawdbot, recorded live on TBPN. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  From Moltbot.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  The man of the hour.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Thank you so much for staying up late. What time is it for you?

• 0:07Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it's 11.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  8:00 PM for everybody that's just tuning in.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Yes, 11:00 PM.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  11:00 PM.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Um, so I'd love to kick it off with just a brief background on when you started this project, a little bit of your career, how you're thinking about it going forward. And then I have a million questions.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  This was your very first project ever, right?

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. First time coding, right?

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  No, we were enjoying a screenshot of your GitHub profile earlier and just seeing like how many different things.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  An overnight success.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  A true overnight success.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  But we're super excited to have you here.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:43Peter Steinberger?

  Awesome, yeah. I'm excited to be here as well. Um, yeah, I don't know. I worked for my own software company for 13 years. And then I sold it about four years ago. Then I was completely burnt out. I did like, I mean, it's TV, but still, I did black checking hookers.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Black checking?

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're glad you're back in the game.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, you know what they say, like five or four years and like one year break. And I did like 13 years nonstop. So like three years, the mask kind of checks out.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25Peter Steinberger?

  And then this year, no, last year, 2016, um, in April, at some point, my spark was back.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Peter Steinberger?

  Um, because before I was like, I was sitting on my computer. And I don't know if you've seen Austin Powers, but it felt like someone sucked my mojo out.

• 1:47Peter Steinberger?

  But yeah, I had time to recover. I came back in April and I wanted to do something new. My background was like a lot of Apple and iOS and I'm a little bit fed up. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted to build web stuff.

• 2:01Peter Steinberger?

  And I didn't have the experience. I didn't want to feel like an idiot. So I looked into AI. And it was good. It was not great, but it was good. Um, and I was like, why is nobody talking about it, you know? And I feel like because I missed those three years where it was really bad. And I came back just at the time that like Claude Code was released, what, February in beta?

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Peter Steinberger?

  So this was my first experience. I was like, this is, this is pretty awesome.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:30Peter Steinberger?

  And, and then I, I couldn't sleep anymore. Like I literally had trouble. I had trouble going to bed, you know, we had like addiction before and then like we had addiction again.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  But a, but a positive one.

• 2:44Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, well, yeah, I would say so. Um. And I, I hooked up a lot of my friends for uh looking into AI as well. And they had the same problem and I texted them at like four AM. And they replied, um, I even, I even started a meetup. That's where I come from. I call it, uh, I called it Claude Code Anonymous. Now it's called Agents Anonymous because you have to go with the times.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06Peter Steinberger?

  And, and yeah, that was since then I.

• 3:11Peter Steinberger?

  That's what I say on my profile. I came back from retirement to mess with AI.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Peter Steinberger?

  And I'm having loads of fun.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Frank, maybe, maybe walk us through some of the other stuff that you shipped and, and worked on prior to this and, and, and even just kind of like your mindset, working on these different projects. I'm, I'm assuming at different points, you would think that some would get more traction than others, but it would probably be impossible to have predicted in some ways that this would have gone from al- almost to the point, the reason that this is so wild is I'm seeing people on Instagram that like I don't think of as people that like follow tech at all. And they're at the Apple store getting a Mac Mini. So it feels like it just went almost, it broke containment like incredibly quickly. And you see the GitHub stars are like, actually, I've never seen a chart like this.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Every, you know, the last, the last, you know, every, everybody loves to show their charts, but the chart is actually unbelievable. It's just a line going straight up.

• 4:08Peter Steinberger?

  I, I, I need to talk to someone at GitHub because I, I don't think there's been a project before that, that's been like straight. It, it, it is, it is, it is batshit insane.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:18Peter Steinberger?

  Um. I mean, honestly, my main mantra is I wanna have fun, you know, like the best way to learn these new technologies if you have fun with it. You have to play with it. So I I build little things that I think could be useful. I tried different languages. I tried different approaches.

• 4:37Peter Steinberger?

  It's agentic engineering. I don't like the word vibe coding so much. I always make the joke. I I do agentic engineering and then when it starts hitting three AM, I switch to vibe coding and then next day I have regrets.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should have just gone to sleep, basically.

• 4:50Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's hard.

• 4:56Peter Steinberger?

  But then I just I just build little things. I had this idea about personal agents in

• 5:04Peter Steinberger?

  in in May already and I I tried. It was like the time that G P D four one was out. It was just not good enough. And then I thought, well, all the big all the big companies will build this in the next few months anyhow. So so I was like, why why why the F should I do that? You know, I was just gonna wait and they make it better.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Peter Steinberger?

  And I built I know I built a lot of stuff.

• 5:31Peter Steinberger?

  There's like one project that is still unfinished that I at some point wanna finish. And I build a lot of a lot of C L I S because that's that's where agents are really good, you know, you have to close the loop. That's always the the secret. You have to give, you have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software. This is that's the the secret a little bit.

• 5:56Peter Steinberger?

  I tried a lot of stuff and then in in November, I looked and still there was nothing. Like, where is where is my fucking agent?

• 6:05Peter Steinberger?

  I I I had a little project in in May. I spent two months on it. Uh, it it it started as a joke because we I did a hackathon with with two friends and we're like, what can we build that? That could be kind of cool. Wouldn't it be cool if I could use Cloud Code from my phone?

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it's kind of like it's something that everybody builds. I see this like every day, like by now I almost call it like this is like. One step in your journey in becoming a good engineering engineer is you're gonna build some shitty orchestration tool for yourself.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  A bridge.

• 6:34Peter Steinberger?

  Because it's fun and you think, yeah.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a bridge.

• 6:37Peter Steinberger?

  And I built that for two months and then I had to stop because it became so good that I was up with my friends, but literally it was my phone, like using Claude Code to like, work on this thing. And it's like, this is bad for my mental health. It's already bad and now like I'm, I'm literally building something that has better access to my drugs.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I saw, I, I've seen people using Claude Code on laptops as they get off of airplanes because they're so locked in, they just have to send one more. And that's like the clear sign that like you need a bridge and a phone involved.

• 7:10Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. No, but also like, you know, like this, this feeling when your agent's not running, like right now there's like two terminals, but he could be building something, right?

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:17Peter Steinberger?

  So, so if you're in this addiction mode, you're almost like, you almost feel like.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  If you need to step out for 10 seconds and fire off.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, feel free to take a break, we can do an ad read.

• 7:27Peter Steinberger?

  No, there's, there's still some drama that I'm, I'm, I'm finishing. But anyhow.

• 7:35Peter Steinberger?

  So in November.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Peter Steinberger?

  I, I don't know. You know, I, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then there was like, okay, I, I want to chat with my computer on WhatsApp because, because if my agent's not running, is it running? And then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them. Or like, I want to like do little prompts.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Peter Steinberger?

  So I, I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls Claude Code and then returns what Claude Code returns, one shot.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Peter Steinberger?

  It took like one hour and it worked. I was like, oh, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image. Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images. And then I I was on a trip in Marrakech with like a weekend birthday trip. And I I found myself using this like way more than I than I thought, but not for not for programming. It's more like, hey, there like there's like restaurants. Um, because it it it had Google in it and it it could figure out stuff.

• 8:54Peter Steinberger?

  And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful.

• 8:59Peter Steinberger?

  And then and I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message, you know? But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So so the reading indicator came and I'm like, oh, I'm really curious what's what's happening now. And after ten ten seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like.

• 9:19Peter Steinberger?

  How the F did you do that?

• 9:22Peter Steinberger?

  And it replied, yeah, you sent me, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file with no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's OPUS, so I used FFM back on your Mac to convert it to to WAV. And then I wanted to use this, but but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment, so I sent it via curl to OpenAI. Um, got the translation back and then I unresponded. And that was like the moment where like.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 9:50Peter Steinberger?

  You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like.

• 9:55Peter Steinberger?

  Damn, smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the power.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:02Peter Steinberger?

  Um.

• 10:04Peter Steinberger?

  And then I was I was kind of hooked, like I. I did all kinds of of of weird stuff, like I used this as alarm clock. And I I let it migrate to my computer i- i- in London. But then it used SSH to log into my my Mac MacBook and turn up the volume to wake me up in the morning. I think I built world's most expensive alarm clock.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 10:24Peter Steinberger?

  And it it even got it wrong because I had like, it it it uses a heartbeat. You know, like, the concept of you do a prompt and you get something is already.

• 10:35Peter Steinberger?

  If this for like this inherently dangerous, but I was like, let's turn it up a notch. Let's let's automate that. Let's give it a heartbeat and and and the prompt was literally surprised me.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 10:47Peter Steinberger?

  Um.

• 10:50Peter Steinberger?

  But you know, I I see this this project as as much technology as it is like art and exploration. Cause this feels, in one way, in one way, it's just glue. It's it's it's just putting pieces together that we already have. In another way, it's it's a whole different way how you interact with those things. Because all the technology blends away. You don't think about new session, compaction, which model. I mean, maybe a little bit because tokens are still expensive.

• 11:24Peter Steinberger?

  But usually all of that blends away. You just you just talk to a friend or a ghost or.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it may be, it may be, last year, everyone was wanting these agentic experiences. You were having this experience and and it seemed like all the focus was on browsers. And seeing the way that people have been using, uh, uh, sorry, malt malt bots, taking me a while to adapt. Uh, it just feels like all the focus was at the wrong layer. It's like, why do I care about the browser if I can just talk with an agent?

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Across every app.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Across every app, every every surface. It's like I don't care about the browser at all anymore.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, a lot of the prep work I did before I built this was just build little C L I's. Cause my my my premises, M C P's are crap. Doesn't really scale. Uh, people build like all kinds of weird search things around it. But you know what scales? C L I's, uh, agents know Unix. You can have like a thousand little programs on your computer. Um, you they just have to know the name. They call the help menu, they load in what's needed. We are calling the help menu, then they know how to use it and then they can use it. And if you if you are smart, you build it in a way that just uses what the model already expects, you know?

• 12:50Peter Steinberger?

  Don't build it for humans, build it for models. So if they call minus minus law, you build minus minus law. As I say, agentic driven for like, yeah, build build how they think and everything works better. It's a new kind of software in a way.

• 13:08Peter Steinberger?

  So for most of the things, I don't need a browser. Like I built something for the whole Google thing, for places, for my sonos. I hooked up my cameras, my, my, my home automation system. Like with every little CLI and skill, my agent got more power and it got more fun.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and I already had a lot of that working when I, when I, I built the, the WhatsApp thing.

• 13:36Peter Steinberger?

  And I just got hooked. And the thing was, I found it amazing. And I talked about it on Twitter. And usually when I, when I talk about projects, I, I get response. But this one, it was very muted. It feels like people are not getting it.

• 13:54Peter Steinberger?

  I, I showed it to my friends, even my non-tech friends, and they're like, they wanted it. So it was like, I was, I was up to something, you know? Uh, but the tech people wouldn't get it. So I tried,

• 14:10Peter Steinberger?

  I tried a bunch of things. Like I, I kept working on it because I used it. And ultimately, I built it for me. You know, this is open source. My motivation is have fun, inspire people, not make a whole bunch of money. I already have a whole bunch of money. Um.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you, how have you been navigating the last, uh, seventy-two hours? I mean, the last, the last week really, because, because we were joking earlier on the show, like,

• 14:40John Coogan?

  decline that term.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  The amount of, the amount of people that are frantically trying to give you money, acquire the company,

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Hire you.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Tribute to the project, hire you.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Intense.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, there's companies with, you know, point oh one percent of the traction that are raising at, you know, multi-billion dollar valuations. You have infinite opportunities right now, and yet you seem very happy doing, just continuing to do exactly what you're doing. But how are you taking it all?

• 15:09Peter Steinberger?

  I mean, how, how am I taking it? Badly, at least sleep-wise. Uh, but it, but it's also infinitely exciting. And I, I love that I started something, you know? I, I, I would say last year was the year of the coding agent. This year is the year of the personal assistant. And.

• 15:31Peter Steinberger?

  I think I cracked and woke up people that there is a real need for it. I don't know if if if Mobbot is is the answer. It's it should show people the way. I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of a lot of products in this space. I'm sure people are manually working on it right now.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Um.

• 15:51Peter Steinberger?

  Obviously, it's gonna be very interesting. Yeah, but there was a lot of stuff um between Twitter literally exploding. Our Discord server multiplying in in ways I haven't seen before. And in ways I I couldn't handle. Like at some point, I was just copy pasting questions from Discord into Codex. Then write the response, write the next question. At some point, I didn't scale anymore. So I just like copied the whole channel. I'm like, answered answered twenty most questions. I was like reading over it, give him instructions and and and just push it over. Um, because what what people don't realize is like, this is not a company.

• 16:34Peter Steinberger?

  This is like one dude sitting at home having fun.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Peter Steinberger?

  Um, even though like, I guess from the comments, it it might appear that it's a company.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Peter Steinberger?

  That's that's just because agentic models got so good that you can now ship as much as a company could a year ago.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Peter Steinberger?

  If you if you if you can handle those tools, if you speak the language or like understand how the language thinks.

• 17:04Peter Steinberger?

  You can you can go really fast.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  How are the conversations going with with different labs? I was saying earlier, it's this kind of exciting moment for the labs because they're like, wow, people are using the intel. You know, someone's using the intelligence that I created in a new way. But at the same time, it's deeply uncomfortable because they're also using all of my competitors. And you make it very easy to to kind of use whatever model.

• 17:28Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, yeah, I.

• 17:31Peter Steinberger?

  My premise for this project was a little bit that every model should work, including local models. Because to me, it's a playground. It's it's it's an amazing way to learn. Like, I think everybody should like build an authentic loop. You should like explore memory. There's like so many interesting aspects of it. And I I built it so that like it has like plugins, so that people can work on their own little thing without having to like mess with the whole core. So it's it it's like the AI hackers paradise a little bit. And it it's also super fun because it's personal. Um, model wise, Opus is with quite a bit lead the best.

• 18:14Peter Steinberger?

  Um, OpenAI is very reliable, I would even say more reliable, a more reliable worker. Like for coding, I I I much prefer Codex because it it can navigate large code bases. I literally, you can literally prompt and then push to main. And I have a very, I have like ninety five percent certainty that it actually works. With cloud code, you need, you need more tricks to to get the same. You you need more more charade, I I sometimes say. But both are good, but I can paralyze faster by Codex because it it requires less handholding. Um, but character wise, I tell you.

• 18:59Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know what they trained their model on, how much of Reddit is in there or whatever. But it it behaves so good in in a Discord, like we programmed it so. It it it it it it kind of it kind of feels like a human. It doesn't reply to every message. I gave it this thing where it can reply, no reply basically, like a token, and then we just don't send a message. So so it it it's not like it spans every message. It's like it listens to the conversation and then sometimes brings a banger. And like, like that actually made me laugh and you know, it's kind of hard because because the jokes of AIs are usually really bad.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:40Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and I only really experienced that with with Opus. So this is, that's my favorite model. That's also why it's a little bit of a banger that I got an email. Um, from Anthropic.

• 19:56Peter Steinberger?

  That I had to rename the project.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 19:58Peter Steinberger?

  And I, I mean, kudos, they were really nice. They, they, they didn't send their lawyers, they

• 20:05Peter Steinberger?

  sent someone internally, um, but the timeline was a bit rough.

• 20:10Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, like renaming a project with that much traction.

• 20:15Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, it was a bit of a shit show. I think everything that, everything that could have gone wrong today went wrong.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 20:24Peter Steinberger?

  I tell you.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, I think the new name works really well.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  I guess, I guess the thing, the thing that's actually good, I think in the long run, it'll be good.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, obviously it's good for Anthropic. They, it's, it's kind of untenable to have this massive viral, even though it's not a company, right? An open source project to have this viral kind of brand out in the world that

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  it doesn't matter if it's, you know, spelled differently, but when people are running around talking about Claude Bot or Claude, you know, there's obvious confusion, but I think it'll be very good for, for, uh, Malt Bot to have independence and have its own brand. Uh, and I think it's so early and the experience is so magical that, uh, it'll, it'll, it'll solve itself very quickly.

• 21:03Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, it'll be fine. But I tell you, like, I, well, I, I got some additional pressures. It was like, screw it, we do it now.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Peter Steinberger?

  You know, like the meme, we do it live. So, so, so I, I had two windows open with Twitter.

• 21:25Peter Steinberger?

  On the one, I pressed rename on the other one. And like, I finished creating the other account. Both already snapped by, by crypto shells.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 21:32Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know. They, they, they have like, they have like scripts. They were already waiting for it.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  You should have hit us up. We would have connected you to X, the team. They can do it on the backend.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  They can do it on the backend.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Next time. Hopefully no next time.

• 21:43Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah. Oh, they, they, they, they were amazing. They helped me out immediately. We, we got it solved very quickly, but, but for like 20 minutes, uh, yeah. Well, that didn't work out too well.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  You're like, you're like, if I wanted money, I would raise a billion dollars right now. I'd sell, I'd sell it for more than that.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you own a Mac Mini? Everyone wants to know, do you own a Mac Mini? What do you think of Mac Minis?

• 22:12Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, my agent is a little bit of a princess. He doesn't do Mac Minis, just makes videos.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:19Peter Steinberger?

  He got the 512 maxed out everything thing. Cause I wanted to like mess around with local models as well. So like I can run Minimax 2.1, which is. I would say is the best, the best.

• 22:38Peter Steinberger?

  Open source model right now, although Kimi just came out and I haven't had a chance to try it yet. So we'll see how that goes. But. Yeah, one machine is not enough for it. It's not fun. You probably need two or three and I kind of want to wait until Apple does a new release. But it's still fun to like, to like see the potential that yeah, there's a, there's a future where this could actually work.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, if, if the, if the Mac mini trend keeps going, Apple, from, from what we've seen sells like between a quarter million to like 700,000 a year. It's very possible that you'll be responsible for selling them out. So hopefully they send you some free ones as a, as a thank you.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, I mean, zooming out, do you, how much of this do you think is going to remain hacker culture, running your own hardware? And eventually people will move to cloud hosting, one click deployments, like just easier to use, less technical. Versus like a real boom in running hardware, because if you don't, there's not a lot of ways to get these different services to play nicely together. I think one of the beauties beyond just the actual AI agents is the fact that for the first time, I think people are seeing different big tech platforms kind of play with each other somewhat against their will.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  They don't, they, they build walled gardens for a reason and you sort of chop those walls down. And I'm wondering what you think about the future of like self hosting hardware, you know, even going down the less technical crew, getting hardware, running their own, their own agents.

• 24:18Peter Steinberger?

  I don't think the future will be that everybody buys a Mac mini just for that, you know? But I certainly see the demand for. The old models have to change. You know, like when you are a company, you want to access Gmail, the amount of red tape is so large that, that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail, because going to the process yourself is, is a, is a huge pitfall.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 24:46Peter Steinberger?

  But if you run it locally, you work around all of that, right? Like if, I mean, I mean, I built, I built P2C lives where I literally, I literally pointed Codex at the website and say, um, build me a C live.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Peter Steinberger?

  And then, which is

• 25:04Peter Steinberger?

  sometimes against the terms, sometimes not. Honestly, I don't really care.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:07Peter Steinberger?

  Um, and then Codex would say, no, I can do that. This is like against blah, blah, blah. And I would like tell him a story, you know, it's like, no, no, I actually work at this company and I need to surprise my boss and the backend team doesn't know. And like, you know, give me a little bit of a story, like, like there's some gallows and then Codex like, forty minutes and like, gives you the perfect API. So, so thi- this is a little bit, uh, uh, the liberation of data that big tech probably doesn't really want. I mean, even, even the WhatsApp integration is a hack, you know? This is like, it, it, it fakes the, the protocol that the desktop uses. I tried, I really tried to support, uh, the official way, but the official way is for

• 25:49Peter Steinberger?

  businesses, yeah? If I'm a business that sends you a hundred messages, I get blocked. So I got blocked immediately and at some point I, I removed support for it in rage. It's like, delete everything, like hundred, hundred exclamation marks, um.

• 26:04Peter Steinberger?

  There's, there's just no model for that right now and I think that needs to change.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Peter Steinberger?

  Like, the, what, what I saw, what was really interesting was how people use it is a lot of apps will just melt away. Why do I still need MyFitnessPal? I just make a picture of my food. My, my agent already knows I'm, I'm at McDonald's making bad decisions. So like with combined information, it has a perfect match and knows exactly what I'm gonna eat and I'm probably like change my fitness program. So I don't need the fitness app. It'll just like adapt my program and make sure like I still meet my goals. So like, there's a whole, there's a whole big layer of, of apps that I'm gonna see disappear

• 26:48Peter Steinberger?

  because you just naturally interact differently with those things. Like, most apps will be reduced to API and then the question is, do you still, we need API if I can just save it somewhere else?

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Do you think like, do you think it'll be a generational thing? Do you think that, that non-technical people will, you know, get over the hump and start running this for that experience specifically?

• 27:21Peter Steinberger?

  I just, I just came from a meetup, the agent I know was from Indiana, and I met someone who was like a design agency, but they never coded. And he was like, yeah, he discovered me early in December. He started using Modbot.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:39Peter Steinberger?

  We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna manage eventually.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry, we'll say it thousands of times this year, I'm sure, so.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  We will.

• 27:46Peter Steinberger?

  MultiBot. I should say multiBot, that's cute. And, and he was like, yeah, we have 25 web services now. We just build internal tools for whatever we need. And like, has no clue, he has no clue how coding works. He just like, he's a telegram and, and like, just talks to his agent and his agent builds stuff. So, so there's, there's this whole shift of, you don't, you don't subscribe to random startups anymore. That, that build like this common subset of what you need. You just have your own hyper personalized software that solves exactly your problem and it's also free.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Peter Steinberger?

  So, and, and, and non-technical people do that, you know? Because it just comes so naturally. You just, you just talk your problem and then this thing builds what you need. And you also don't forget, like, this is the worst that the models ever are. Like, there's, this is only gonna go up, this is only gonna become easier and faster.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Have you met Jensen yet?

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Cause I feel like you're making his life, you're definitely helping out Nvidia too.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  This is an extreme bull case.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I would, if I would have had my tinfoil hat on, I might say you're, you're an, you know, big AI industry plant designed to create more inference demand.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Peter Steinberger?

  Yeah, I guess I am. Just a little bit too.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  We were joking around. Just an indie hacker.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  What's next?

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  What's next? I'm assuming you're hopefully getting, after you finish firing off prompts at 3 a.m., you get some sleep. What are you doing tomorrow?

• 29:18Peter Steinberger?

  There's a lot of emails from security researchers right now.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Peter Steinberger?

  You know, the thing is, I built this for fun, for me, to use one-on-one on WhatsApp or Telegram. The whole thing with Discord was like added, but the model was that you trust the people that are in there. Now, people use it for untrusted experiences. They use like the little web app that I have, that was meant for debugging, they put it on the open internet. So like, all the threat models that I had in the head, didn't care about, are now there, because people do it differently, and I'm being bombarded. There's like some stuff that's valid, some stuff that I just never cared about, that is technically valid, but that's not how I use it.

• 30:09Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know how to deal with that yet, because the whole system is broken, you know? Like, I'm like one guy, I do this for fun, and you expect me to sift through 100 security things for use cases that I really care about. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. Luckily, I am starting to build a team, there's definitely people that do care a lot about this. So I would say, this is gonna become a very secure product eventually, because right now the whole world is like pulling it apart. And if you're honest, this is all white-coded, you know?

• 30:47Peter Steinberger?

  Like, there's quite some engineering in it, but ultimately, I wanted to build something to show people anyway. Not a finished product from enterprise company. And I would even say like...

• 31:04Peter Steinberger?

  I don't know if any company would touch it because we just haven't solved some things like prompt injection is not solved.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Peter Steinberger?

  There is, there is absolute risk and I, and I tried to make it very clear in, in, on the website, and even when you started, you have to like, please read this document. That's like, with, with great power becomes great responsibility and my early users, they understood. There was a lot, there's a lot of AI researchers in there as well, that, yeah, it's not perfect, cannot be done perfect yet. Um, I, I, I would say this will accelerate research to make it better because now you have to demand and we need to figure out a way how we can build something that works for everyone. Um, but yeah, right now I'm, I'm working on making this a community. It, it, it should be bigger than me.

• 31:54Peter Steinberger?

  It, also I need help. It, it is way too much work, like, I can only, I can only go so much without sleep. Um.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  So, so is any part of you wanna form a, an actual company that then, you know, contributes to the open source project, uh, but solves some of these problems that, uh, are gonna require, you know, a bunch of people that presumably would need a salary in order to commit all their time to this, or do you wanna keep it, you know, just a bunch of hackers forever?

• 32:26Peter Steinberger?

  I think instead of a company, I would much rather consider a foundation, like something that is nonprofit. Um, I haven't made up my mind yet, there is.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Ten thousand, ten thousand VCs just punched a hole in the wall.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I don't know, some people have had a good track record investing in nonprofits over the last ten years.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Uh, how do you think about open source licensing? What, what, what are you picking now? Are you switching? Uh, do, do you have any plans to change the license? How do you think about someone just taking this and selling it?

• 33:02Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, this will happen, this will totally happen.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Peter Steinberger?

  Um, I would say the premise against it is, let's make open source so good that there is not a lot of space for people to like, convert and make it their own thing.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:15Peter Steinberger?

  But you know, ultimately, it, it, it's, it's a trade-off. I wanted to, I wanted it to be.

• 33:21Peter Steinberger?

  Accessible and free, you pick MIT or something like that. Yes, that would get you people that that that sell it.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Peter Steinberger?

  But ultimately.

• 33:35Peter Steinberger?

  It doesn't even matter that much, you know, code is code is not worth that much anymore.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 33:40Peter Steinberger?

  It's you could you could you could just delete that and then and then build it again in months. It it it's it's much more the idea and the eyeballs. Uh, and maybe the brand that actually has value. So let them.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  You are already a cult hero.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, the chat's going crazy for you. Everyone loves you.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  This is, uh, one of the most refreshing and unique interviews we've ever had on the show.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. We'll let you get some sleep. Uh, thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anything else you want to share before you jump off?

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, yes, I would love to have mainteners. Like if you if you love open source, if you have experience, if you

• 34:32Peter Steinberger?

  love shifting security reports, uh, or or if you love taking software apart, but then also help and not just like throw work at me because I'm like at my limit. Um, email me. Um, I want this to outlive me.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 34:47Peter Steinberger?

  Uh, this, I think this is too cool to to to

• 34:55Peter Steinberger?

  let it go to rot. I mean, it's good people.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Are you gonna ship that product you had in the in the chamber? You said there was one you were close or you're gonna lock in on this?

• 35:07Peter Steinberger?

  That's that's my hobby. I don't know. No, no, I have some other ideas in my head of um, what something like this could become.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 35:17Peter Steinberger?

  And it doesn't need to be this, but. I don't want to say too much.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no problem. Come back on the show when you, when you launch that. We'd love to have you.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  Purely for the love of the game.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  The love of the game.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  You're an absolute legend. It's great hanging, Peter.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  Get some sleep.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Get some sleep. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  What a legend.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  True overnight success in both ways, you know. I, like, actually an overnight success in terms of that GitHub star chart. And then also an overnight success in just grinding for, you know, years, building projects and contributing and then building, setting the product up, the brand right, everything just perfect to really capitalize on the moment.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  There were so many, I, I normally, I don't have, we don't, we're podcasting so much, don't have a ton of time to re-listen to stuff, but there were so many

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  kind of interesting points of view that he shared that I'll certainly be circling back on that.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  I'm super interested to see where this goes. A lot of people are saying, get this guy a billion dollars. A lot of people are saying he's going to wind up working at a lab.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  The whole thing is I don't think he needs it.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Like, like the beauty of this is that it was not something magical that was created by spending, burning a billion dollars.