Peter Steinberger
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
Peter Steinberger did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsTurns out, brtfs cow-feature is GREAT for worktrees and terrible for sqlite
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Their wordsthe Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsThe biggest design mistake I made when we moved OC to sqlite: using sync db access. When it was just an agent that reports to you on Slack or iMessage this was fine; now that one agent might do 50 sessions in parallel and the whole team works on it, it is limiting.
- 1 day earlier
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LLMscreativityideas vs execution
Their wordsBiggest limitation isn’t the tech, it’s imagination and creativity.
- 1 day earlier
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Our reading
Modern AI models tend to write tests for every tiny change, even when those tests aren't useful.
Their wordsModern models just love writing tests for every tiny change, even if they aren't useful.
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsThe beauty of running a claw yourself: they cannot block you.
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsDuplicating logic is no longer painful. Abstractions still are.
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsBut each time there was a strong emotion and the best part there were quite a few people that really wanted it and like especially to my nontechnical friends I told them no this is not yet for you and they got mad. So if that's not an indicator to have product market fit I don't know what is.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 1st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsEverything that everything you can build can be forked or cloned, but your name cannot. So your personal brand is way more important than any single product that you ever will start working on that before you need it.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 2nd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsWe did the the numbers and the numbers are more like 0.3%. We scanned all 67,000. We shipped the we shipped the paper. But you know a correction never travels as far as a scare.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 3rd of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSure, they they like the abstract term of security, but in all practical terms, they updated. I broke something they depended on. I made things slower and I made things more difficult to update.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 4th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsYou know features are the fun part. A new feature is is just a prompt away. The real cost comes after every feature we shipped of course with a configuration option because we didn't want to break everyone's setup.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 5th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 6th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo maybe write this one down. Your dependencies business model is your business model.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 7th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsBoth of those are true at the same time. A hype is like the weather. You might see it coming, but you can't control it.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 8th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's hard to compete with someone who's just there having fun. Fun is velocity. The weeks I enjoyed building, the product got visibly better.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 9th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsEvery lab will sell you an agent. Open claw is the alternative. Open source runs everywhere, works with any model. And if you run local models, your data never has to leave your device.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 10th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd these days it's more like my sessions are topics. clearing the session sometimes even a disadvantage because there's so much information in there that helps the agent.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 11th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAt the same time, at work, if you come to me and you you tell me this feature idea, I'm going to get mad at you. Like, it's so easy that you just discuss the feature idea with an agent, you build it, you make screenshots, you let me play with it.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 12th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSo if you design call it loop, call it graph, call it workflow, it's kind of all the same. If you design something that gets a trigger or gets an input and does something for you and maybe there's a decision in the way, boom, there's your graph.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 13th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsPart of it is just like you develop a little bit of a feeling how long something should take. So if I do a small tweak that should like change how dragging works and it takes three hours, I know something's wrong. I'll look closely. But otherwise, part of code review is simply like observing, looking how big it changes and trusting your gut.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 14th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsUser number one should be you. And my users two to 20 were friends. So I'm sure you have some people that would actually test your stuff, but you need to be the first user. If you don't if you don't get excited of what you're building, it'll probably not make sense.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 15th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd most of them really sent reports that their agent produced without actually even testing it. I would I would take a stronger sense of explaining what are the parts that we guarantee and what are the parts that will not be fixed because that that's not our security boundary.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 16th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsNow, if I do web stuff, it's easy to create a cloud session. If I do like something that requires Mac OS, that's already where like 99% of the tools fail me.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 17th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsit is always tempting to add this one feature that looks really cool but what you rarely think about is when you merge this feature it really means here's this pile of code that I don't that the person probably doesn't really understand that I don't fully understand
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 18th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsI mean, honestly, that's not so much a tech problem. It's more a token problem where we could do that today, but you wouldn't get very far with your subscription and not everyone is willing to spend so many tokens.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 19th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsThe the part that's really nice about it is because I do a lot of Mac software, agents love to take over my screen and click around and if you put that in their own if you give them their own machine, it will not bother you. Otherwise, you'll fight with the agent for the mouse cursor.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 20th of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsSecond of all is I hope you worked on your personal brand and on visibility because in this day and age there's so much noise out there that your hardest problem is not the tech, it's not the software, not even the people. The hardest problem now is like getting eyeballs.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 21st of 22 in this recording
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Their wordsMaybe I would pick something again that's that's in the category hard and boring because that's usually a category that is a little bit easier to actually find people that will appreciate when you solved something. If you pick something that is fun, even if it's hard, you're gonna have a very tough time, especially in a time where people can just prompt things into existence.
↗Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com 22nd of 22 in this recording
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsYes, I could totally see how OpenClaw could become a huge company. And no, it’s not really exciting for me. I’m a builder at heart. I did the whole creating-a-company game already, poured 13 years of my life into it and learned a lot. What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.