Twitter/X

On 2026-05-06 @james406 offered a senior engineer role; the candidate responded…

2026-05-06 · 15:00 UTC ·@james406 ·0 min read

Brief

@james406 recounts that after sending an offer to a senior engineer (published 2026-05-06), the candidate negotiated for unusual resources: unlimited token spend, an NVIDIA H100 GPU, unlimited electricity, $2,000 gold-plated HDMI cables, and a bespoke 20TB dataset with all YC Demo Day pitches, emails from 2020–2023, and future SWE-bench tasks. He found the demands suspicious, called the counterpart an "OpenClaw," and solicited advice.

Why it matters

On 2026-05-06 @james406 offered a senior engineer role; the candidate responded with negotiable demands including unlimited token spend, an NVIDIA H100 GPU, and unlimited electricity.

Key details

  • The candidate also requested $2,000 gold-plated HDMI cables and a bespoke 20TB dataset containing every YC Demo Day pitch, every email sent from 2020–2023, and all future SWE-bench tasks; @james406 concluded he was negotiating with an "OpenClaw" and asked what to do.
Source evidence

sent an offer to a senior engineer.

she wanted to negotiate.

i said sure.

she said her demands included unlimited token spend.

no problem.

she also requested an NVIDIA H100 GPU.

this was a key hire, so i was willing to give on that.

oh, and unlimited electricity.

weird thing to add, but ok.

she then asked for $2,000 gold-plated HDMI cables.

this is getting fishy, i thought.

finally, she asked for a bespoke 20TB data set including every YC Demo Day pitch, every email sent from 2020-2023, and all future SWE-bench tasks.

at this point i realized i was negotiating with an OpenClaw

what should i do here?