Peter Steinberger
Edited by Solomon
[New Intelligence Yuan Introduction] Three people, 100 AI agents, $1.3 million spent in one month— the founder of OpenClaw has turned software development into an "AI assembly line," with OpenAI footing the bill.
While others post their pay stubs, he posts his bill—$1.3 million in one month!
That’s nearly 9 million RMB per month—left netizens completely stunned.
Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, casually posted a screenshot on X.
Peter Steinberger
But the numbers in the screenshot are truly unsettling:
30-day spending: $1,305,088.81. Consumed 603 billion tokens. Initiated 7.6 million requests.
You read that right—it’s $1.3 million. And no, this isn’t a big company’s quarterly AI budget—it’s what a team of three used in one month.
Even more astonishing: OpenAI will cover the cost.
The comment section went crazy instantly.
Some were amazed, others questioned, and some pulled out calculators to figure out how many programmers this was equivalent to.
Steinberger himself responded: “After turning off the fast mode, my spending fell below the cost of one engineer, and it truly made a much bigger difference.”
Really a great deal!
Some netizens were amazed by the engineer earning $400,000 per month: “The job market in San Francisco is insane.”
User comments
User comments
Some netizens are also curious about where all these tokens have been spent.
Peter's response was mostly directed toward the development of OpenClaw.
User comments
Cloud Developer Army
The most outrageous thing about this is that Pete’s team consisted of only three people.
They have been running approximately 100 Codex instances in the cloud, doing the dirtiest, most exhausting, and most sanity-testing work in software engineering—
Review PRs, find security vulnerabilities, duplicate issues, fix bugs, monitor benchmarks, post regressions to Discord, and even open PRs immediately after meetings.
Thus, AI is no longer just “helping you write code”—it’s entering every nook and cranny of software collaboration.
That's pretty scary.
The real cost of software development lies in communication, understanding, context switching, reviewing, regression, fixing, waiting, and repetitive work.
In the past, a team spent a large amount of time each day on tasks that didn’t seem like “creation,” but without which the project would fall apart.
Now, Peter handed all these tasks off to a group of AI agents.
This is where AI begins to maintain the nervous system of your organization.
Schematic diagram
There’s another important detail in this screenshot: it’s not the OpenAI backend, but CodexBar created by Peter.
CodexBar is a macOS menu bar tool that tracks usage windows, credits, costs, and reset times for various AI programming tools.
It supports a wide range of services, including Codex, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, and Copilot.
What was in the programmer's menu bar before? CPU, memory, battery, network speed.
Now there’s something new: tokens. Tokens are becoming a new form of “means of production.”
CodexBar
Just a few final words
$1.3 million per month, 3 people, 100 AI agents.
Consider these numbers—three real people, supported by a hundred digital employees who never eat, never sleep, and never ask for a raise, accomplishing the work of an entire engineering team.
Some people felt exhilarated after reading it: AI is finally no longer just a pretty face that can only chat! Others felt chilled: Wait, if that’s the case, what will we coders do in the future?
But to be honest, what keeps me up at night is Steinberger’s offhand comment: “I’m exploring what software development would look like if token costs weren’t an issue.”
Peter Steinberger
Everyone, he said "if."
The problem is that this "if" is rapidly turning into a "when."
Today, work worth $1.3 million is priced at $130,000 after one price reduction, and then $13,000 after another.
On that day, 100 AI agents working simultaneously won’t be an exclusive privilege of Silicon Valley elites—it’ll be standard practice for any three-person startup team.
Three young people in a garage, wielding a hundred tireless AI programmers—just picture that; it’s absurd.
Peter Steinberger revealed his hand.
Under the card it says: The future is already knocking, and it has no intention of waiting for you to be ready.
Reference materials:
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 is from the WeChat public account "New Intelligence Yuan," authored by New Intelligence Yuan.