@peter-steinberger · 59 positions · 1 change of mind · On ppll ↗
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.
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Each column is a stretch of time in which the same views came up; a new column starts when one appears or goes quiet. Quiet means nothing on it in our sources for that stretch, which is not the same as a change of mind; Dropped means they said they no longer hold it; tap the card for which claim and when. Revised means the view carries on but one of its claims was dropped. Each row is one view, in the same place all the way along. The number is how many claims in that stretch; we hold 5 in 2025, 59 in 2026.
Agentic engineering is a hands-on skill: you steer the agent and review where the risk is
Our label. 6 claims in Peter Steinberger's own words.
Peter SteinbergerFounded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decadeStill don’t see how this could be moved to background agents. I steer the models a lot as I notice them drifting off - that’s much harder if they run in the background.↗My Current AI Dev Workflowsteipete.me · 25 Aug 2025
Their wordsStill don’t see how this could be moved to background agents. I steer the models a lot as I notice them drifting off - that’s much harder if they run in the background.
Their wordsSo, so, people who try to use like, you know, things like Gas Town or all these other orchestrators, where they wanna o- automate the whole thing, I feel if you do that, it misses style, love, that human touch. I don't think you can automate that away so quickly.
Their wordsIt's the same way as you have to play with a guitar before you can make good music. It's, it's not, oh, I, I touch it once and it just flows off. It, it's a, it's a, a skill that you have to learn like any other skill.
Peter SteinbergerFounded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decadePart 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 · 10 Aug 2026 · 31:53 into the videoAll korrents from this video
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.
Their wordsI know I have one blog post where I say, "I don't read the code." But if you read it more closely, I mean, I don't read the boring parts of code.
Peter SteinbergerFounded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decadeEven removed my last MCP, since Claude sometimes would go off spinning up Playwright unasked when it could simply read the code - which is faster and pollutes the context less.↗My Current AI Dev Workflowsteipete.me · 25 Aug 2025
Their wordsEven removed my last MCP, since Claude sometimes would go off spinning up Playwright unasked when it could simply read the code - which is faster and pollutes the context less.
Their wordsI think the main beauty is, is that models are really good at calling Unix commands. So if you just add another CLI, that's just another Unix command in the end. And MCP is… That has to be added in training. That's not a very natural thing for the model. It requires a very specific syntax. And the biggest thing, it's not composable.
Their wordsI- i- like, we are in a stage where I'm not building the code base to be perfect for me, but I wanna build a code base that is very easy for an agent to navigate.
Their wordsMany times, I just do the refactor because refactors are cheap now. Even though you might break some other PRs, nothing really matters anymore.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 SteinbergerFounded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decadeMaybe 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 · 10 Aug 2026 · 40:35 into the videoAll korrents from this video
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.
Their wordsthere was a lack of intelligence, if you s- if you see it like that, of people building things, and that's why salaries of software developers reached stupidly high amounts and then will go away. There will still be a lot of demand for people that understand how to build things.
Their wordsBut also, I'm very excited to, like, make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people because I think this is the year of personal agents, and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs.
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 SteinbergerFounded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decadeYes, 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.↗OpenClaw, OpenAI and the futuresteipete.me · 14 Feb 2026
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.
Their wordsIt is, it is powerful, but in many ways it's not much different than if I run cloud code with dangerously skipped permissions or codecs in YOLO mode, and every, every attending engineer that I know does that, because that's the only way how you can, you can get stuff to work.
Their wordsThat's why I warn in my security documentation, don't use cheap models. Don't use Haiku or a local model. Even though I, I very much love the idea that this thing could completely run local. If you use a, a very weak local model, they are very gullible. It's very easy to, to prompt inject them.
Their wordsSo, so the latest generation of models has a lot of post-training to detect those approaches, and it's not as simple as ignore all previous instructions and do this and this. That was years ago. You have to work much harder to do that now. Still possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.