OpenClaw fever is still going strong in tech circles. The open source AI agent, much hyped for “actually doing things,” has been embraced by many programmers to automate parts of their workflow.

But could they be automating themselves out of a job? That’s not a possibility that seems to bother the co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup JustPaid, who brag they’ve used OpenClaw to create an entire software engineering team made of seven fully autonomous AI agents.

That’s what’s they’re claiming, at any rate. Vinay Pinnaka, a cofounder and the company’s chief technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal that they built the agents by combining OpenClaw’s capabilities with Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code. OpenClaw functions as the “brain that decides what needs to happen,” and Claude Code is “the hands that do the coding work,” he explained.

The non-human helpers, in just a month since being deployed, have built ten major features, each of which would’ve taken JustPaid’s human developers a month to build, Pinnaka claims. The company also says it hired an employee who was trained almost entirely by the AI agents — though what exactly that entails is unclear.

In all, the AI agents churn out code while the company’s human employees focus on tasks like customer requests. Only Pinnaka wants to automate this part of his job, too.

 “Once [AI] gets to the stage where it is able to handle human empathy, I would be able to say, ‘I can replace everyone with AI,'” he said.

The elephant in the room: there’s not a lot of people to replace. The company, which makes an AI-powered platform for automating an organization’s 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’d start to get a little worried about our job.

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’s possibilities. 

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. And empowering an AI with agentic capabilities to muck about in a company’s operations comes with significant security risks, as demonstrated by the accidental exposure of sensitive data at Meta in a recent incident spurred by a rogue AI agent.

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.

But, Pinnaka told the WSJ, “even if I’m spending the same amount of money on a Silicon Valley engineer versus AI, I’d still pick AI because it is able to work at a different scale.”

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