Peter Steinberger
Editor: Solomon
[New Zhiyuan Report] 3 people, 100 AI agents, burning through $1.3 million a month — The father of OpenClaw has turned software development into an "AI assembly line," with OpenAI picking up the tab.
While others show off their pay stubs, he shows off the bill — $1.3 million a month!
That's nearly 9 million RMB per month. It's left netizens utterly dumbfounded.
OpenClaw father Peter Steinberger casually posted a screenshot on X.
Peter Steinberger
But the numbers on the screenshot were anything but casual:
30-day spend: $1,305,088.81. Consumed 603 billion tokens. Made 7.6 million requests.
You read that right, 1.3 million U.S. dollars. And it's not a quarterly AI budget for some big tech company — it's the monthly usage of a three-person team.
Even more explosive: OpenAI is reimbursing this cost.
The comment section instantly went wild.
Some were amazed, some skeptical, some whipped out their calculators to figure out "how many programmers this equals."
Steinberger himself calmly responded: "With fast mode off, my cost is less than an engineer, and it really helps a lot more."
Translation: — It's genuinely cost-effective!
Other netizens were shocked by the $400k/month engineer — "The San Francisco job market is insane."
Netizen comment
Netizen comment
Others were curious about where this massive token usage went.
Peter responded that most was used for OpenClaw development.
Netizen comment
A Cloud-Based Programmer Army
The most outrageous thing is that Pete's small team only has 3 people.
They have about 100 Codex instances running long-term in the cloud, handling the dirtiest, most grueling, most mind-numbing work in software engineering —
Reviewing PRs, finding security vulnerabilities, deduplicating issues, fixing bugs, monitoring benchmarks, posting to Discord upon discovering regressions, even opening PRs directly after listening to meetings.
Thus, AI isn't just "helping you write code," but is infiltrating every crevice of software collaboration.
This is terrifying.
Because what's truly expensive in software development is communication, comprehension, context switching, review, regression, fixes, waiting, and repetitive tasks.
In the past, a team spent a huge amount of time each day on these things that don't seem like "creation" but without which the project would rot.
Now, Peter has tossed all these processes to a bunch of AI agents at once.
This is AI starting to maintain the nervous system of an organization for you.
Illustration
There's another important detail in this screenshot: it's not the OpenAI backend, but CodexBar made by Peter.
CodexBar is a macOS menu bar tool for tracking usage windows, credits, costs, and reset times for various AI programming tools.
It supports a bunch of services like Codex, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, etc.
What used to be in a programmer's menu bar? CPU, memory, battery, network speed.
Now there's one more thing: tokens. Tokens are becoming a new "means of production."
CodexBar
A Final Word
$1.3 million a month, 3 people, 100 AI agents.
Ponder this set of numbers — three living humans, leading a hundred digital employees who don't eat, sleep, or demand raises, doing the work of an entire engineering team.
Some felt invigorated after reading this: AI finally isn't just a decorative vase for chatting! Others felt a chill down their spine: Wait, so what do we coders do in the future?
But honestly, what keeps me up at night is Steinberger's casual remark: "I'm exploring what software development would look like if token cost wasn't an issue."
Peter Steinberger
Everyone, he said "if."
The problem is, this "if" is visibly turning into "when" at an astonishing speed.
The work that costs $1.3 million today, after one price cut for models, becomes $130k. Another cut, $13k.
On that day, having 100 AI agents working simultaneously is no longer a game exclusive to Silicon Valley big shots, but a basic operation for any three-person startup team.
Three young people in a garage, holding a hundred tireless AI programmers — this image, just thinking about it is absurd.
Peter Steinberger has revealed the bottom card.
On the card it says: The future is already knocking, and it doesn't plan to wait for you to be ready.
References:
https://the-decoder.com/for-1-3-million-a-month-openclaw-founder-peter-steinberger-runs-100-ai-agents-that-code-review-prs-and-find-bugs/
https://x.com/steipete/status/2055346265869721905
https://developers.openai.com/codex/speed
This article comes from the WeChat public account "New Zhiyuan", author: New Zhiyuan
