Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
OpenClaw fever is still going strong in tech circles<\/a>. The open source AI agent, much hyped for \u201cactually doing things,\u201d has been embraced by many programmers to automate parts of their workflow.<\/p>\n But could they be automating themselves out of a job? That\u2019s not a possibility that seems to bother the co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup JustPaid, who brag they\u2019ve used OpenClaw to create an entire software engineering team made of seven fully autonomous AI agents.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what\u2019s they\u2019re claiming, at any rate. Vinay Pinnaka, a cofounder and the company\u2019s chief technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal<\/a> that they built the agents by combining OpenClaw\u2019s capabilities with Anthropic\u2019s AI coding tool Claude Code<\/a>. OpenClaw functions as the \u201cbrain that decides what needs to happen,\u201d and Claude Code is \u201cthe hands that do the coding work,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n The non-human helpers, in just a month since being deployed, have built ten major features, each of which would\u2019ve taken JustPaid\u2019s human developers a month to build, Pinnaka claims. The company also says it hired\u00a0an employee who was trained almost entirely by the AI agents \u2014 though what exactly that entails is unclear.<\/p>\n In all, the AI agents churn out code while the company\u2019s human employees focus on tasks like customer requests. Only Pinnaka wants to automate this part of his job, too.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cOnce [AI] gets to the stage where it is able to handle human empathy, I would be able to say, \u2018I can replace everyone with AI,’\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The elephant in the room: there\u2019s not a lot of people to replace. The company, which makes an AI-powered platform for automating an organization\u2019s financial operations like billing and invoicing, boasts just nine employees, three of whom are cofounders. The AI bots nearly equal the humans. If we were one of the six non-cofounders there, we\u2019d start to get a little worried about our job.<\/p>\n Of course, this could all be bluster, a way of drawing attention to a company that offers an AI service, serving to further impress potential customers who are already dazzled by AI\u2019s possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nonetheless, it does speak to a broader trend of AI tools being embraced by software engineers, which is coming at a cost. Many of these coders are now admitting that using AI at their jobs is causing them to get burned out<\/a>. And empowering an AI with agentic capabilities to muck about in a company\u2019s operations comes with significant security risks<\/a>, as demonstrated by the accidental exposure of sensitive data at Meta in a recent incident spurred by a rogue AI agent<\/a>.<\/p>\n The other cost of embracing AI agents is, well, the costs. Pinnaka said he was spending $4,000 a week to run Claude Code and OpenClaw when he first started experimenting with them. He now claims to have brought the bill down to $10,000 to $15,000 per a month, which would make a handsome salary for a human, especially in a gloomy hiring market.<\/p>\n But, Pinnaka told the WSJ, \u201ceven if I\u2019m spending the same amount of money on a Silicon Valley engineer versus AI, I\u2019d still pick AI because it is able to work at a different scale.\u201d<\/p>\n