What Software Development Looks Like When Tokens Cost Nothing 💸

We all complain that services are cutting limits and raising prices, but somewhere they are playing a completely different game.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger showed a screenshot of his dashboard. Over the last 30 days, his team burned through a modest $1,305,088.81 on API calls.

Peter explains where such budgets go. His team asked themselves: “How would we build software if token cost didn’t matter?”

They automated absolutely everything they could get their hands on. They have about 100 agent instances running non-stop in the cloud, which:
▫️ Review every single commit and PR for bugs and security vulnerabilities.
▫️ Deduplicate issues and find old tickets themselves, closing them after a fix in main.
▫️ Agents can spin up ephemeral environments, log into Telegram, record video of the app working “before/after” a fix, and attach it to the PR.
▫️ And the best part: agents simply listen to the team’s work calls and proactively create PRs with new features right during voice discussions.

Steinberger states outright: this whole machinery allows them to keep the project "extremely lean". That is, simply put, not to hire a crowd of developers.

Any services will gladly cut off access to solo physicists in order to ship capacity to the guys who pay $20k a day for total automation of routine.

Wouldn't it happen that all normal development remains for the fat cats, and the rest can't even get into it 😁