The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"
Summary
Peter Steinberger, creator of PSPDF Kit (used on 1B+ devices), discusses his radical new approach to software development with AI where he ships code without reading it, merges 600 commits daily, and believes code reviews are obsolete in an AI-assisted workflow.
Key Takeaways
- Shipping code you don't read is viable when using AI assistance properly - Peter merges 600 commits in a single day while maintaining quality through AI validation rather than human review.
- Traditional code reviews are becoming obsolete - PR should be reframed as 'prompt requests' to reflect how AI-assisted development actually works.
- The 'closing the loop principle' is critical for effective AI assistant coding - it separates functional AI workflows from ineffective ones.
- Building products that solve personal pain points works - Peter's dating app earned $10k in the first month after he hacked together an HTML parser solution to a frustrating UX problem.
- Staying scrappy and using beta/unconventional tech early can be advantageous - Peter built his first iOS app using beta iOS, beta CoreData, and hacked GCC before it was officially supported.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
What if you could merge 600 commits on a single day and none of it was slopp? This is what today's guest, Peter Stainberger, the creator of Claudebot, claims he's doing. Peter is a standout developer who built PSP PDF kit, the PDF framework used on more than 1 billion devices. Then he burned out, sold his shares, and disappeared from tech for 3 years. This year, he came back and how he builds and what he's doing now looks nothing like traditional software development. In today's episode, we cover why he no longer reads most of the code he ships, and why that's not as crazy as it sounds. How he is building Clawbot, his wildly popular personal assistant project, which feels like the future of Siri, the closing the loop principle that separates effective AI assistant coding from frustrating v…