One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was hiring you, Pecs. You’re easily ranked as one of the top engineers I’ve worked with in my entire life.
My fondest memory of you was the work to switch from delivery radius to polygons. So much reading, thinking and testing. You demo-ed that thing and omo, I knew my work was done on delivery engineering.
Second one was your algorithm to rank display that you literally told me. “Femi, don’t make changes to the db on my tables without my permission. My code takes care of this” 😂.
Working with you has been such a thrill!
Will you ever reduce the length of your function names though? 😔
One guy, coding alone at 5am, built the fastest-growing GitHub repo in history. 194,000 stars. Faster than React, Linux, and Kubernetes combined.
OpenAI, with thousands of engineers and billions in compute, couldn’t build it first. Steinberger connected Claude’s API to WhatsApp in an hour one night in November 2025. He called it a toy. Three months later, Meta’s Zuckerberg is DMing him on WhatsApp and Altman is offering Cerebras compute to win him over.
The math tells the whole story. Steinberger was spending $10,000-$20,000 a month of his own money, operating at a loss, routing sponsorship dollars to dependencies instead of his own pocket. OpenAI spent $13 billion of Microsoft’s money. And the solo dev’s agent framework went more viral than anything OpenAI shipped.
Sam calling him “a genius with a lot of amazing ideas” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. This is an acqui-hire of a project that proved OpenAI’s biggest vulnerability: the agent layer doesn’t need to be built by the model provider. Any developer with an API key and a messaging app could build a more compelling agent experience than the companies training the models. Steinberger proved it.
“OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project” sounds reassuring until you remember that Chrome technically has Chromium too. Steinberger himself made the comparison. The open source version gets maintenance. The real agent capabilities get folded into ChatGPT’s product roadmap.
Sold his last company PSPDFKit for $100M+. Spent three years doing ayahuasca and traveling. Came back, failed at 43 projects, then built the most important open source AI agent on project 44.
OpenAI hired the guy who proved you don’t need $10B to build the agent future. You just need to ship faster than the committee can approve a product spec.
The fact that people were there for me at my lowest point I’ll always be there for others I don’t care if they let me down or not there’s just something unexplainable that to happens to you when people are actually there for you and everyone deserves to experience this
CHANGE YOUR TITLE
In 2011 while in my 3rd year in University, I lost my dad who was responsible for paying my fees. I guess he decided to join his wife, my mum who died 5 years earlier in 2006. It seemed like the whole world had come to an end. My world came crashing. Shortly after his burial, I got awarded the Total undergraduate scholarship which put in N150,000 in my account every session. Although my parents were dead, the rest of my university education was massively smooth because I had made efforts to submit a scholarship application.
The picture shows me typing my undergraduate thesis on my very first laptop (purchased with my first scholarship amount) in my room in "Anas house, high court, Keffi, Nasarawa state University Nigeria".
This was the deliberate start of my scholarship application journey. Since 2011, the rest of my university education (Masters and PhD) were funded by scholarships.
Since 2011, I took steps to not just be any kind of orphan but a "Privileged Orphan". By societal standards, I was an orphan but I literally changed the title by adding a simple prefix- Privileged. This was deliberate. It took work and grace. Things are different today and the work continues.
What's your story? What's your current situation? What's the title about yourself you wanna change? What does society make or think of you? What steps are you taking to change that title? Trust me, from where I am standing, I know you can change your title, it begins with a move. Are you simply talking about it or are you actually going to start doing it?
In closing, "Until you change your societally assigned title, your growth might remain limited".
Get to work and change that title. See you at the top.
#AAPTalks #CommunityDevelopmentWorker #Aa2Zi #ScholarshipSweetDie