So who made this thing? Peter Steinberger, the founder of PSPDFKit, a PDF SDK used by companies like Dropbox and Autodesk. In November 2025, he sat down on a Friday night and built the first version of OpenClaw over a single weekend. His goal was straightforward: wire an LLM into Telegram so it could read messages, browse the web, and run shell commands on his behalf.
The prototype worked, so he open-sourced it the next week. Within 3 months, the repo crossed 171K+ GitHub stars. That made it the fastest-growing open-source project of its era. Can you think of another repo that grew that fast?