Seventeen developers independently created solutions for the same bug in OpenClaw, with all fixes sitting unreviewed in the project's pull request backlog. This duplication represents a systemic issue in modern open-source development, according to an analysis by VectorCertain LLC that identified an estimated 2,000 hours of wasted developer time across the OpenClaw project.
VectorCertain's multi-model AI consensus platform analyzed all 3,434 open pull requests in the OpenClaw GitHub repository, which has 197,000 followers. The analysis revealed that 20% of pending contributions are duplicates, creating 283 duplicate clusters and 688 redundant pull requests that clog review pipelines and consume maintainer attention. The largest duplication cluster documented involved 17 independent solutions to a single Slack direct messaging bug.
The findings arrive at a critical moment for OpenClaw, following project creator Peter Steinberger's departure to OpenAI and the project's transition to a foundation structure. Steinberger had publicly stated that "unit tests aint cut it" for maintaining the platform at scale after a production database outage. Joseph P. Conroy, founder and CEO of VectorCertain, explained the distinction: "Unit tests verify that code does what a developer intended. Multi-model consensus verifies that what the developer built is the right thing to build."
OpenClaw faces additional governance challenges beyond duplicate pull requests, including security concerns from the ClawHavoc campaign that identified 341 malicious skills in its marketplace and a Snyk report finding credential-handling flaws in 7.1% of registered skills. Despite maintainers merging hundreds of commits daily, the project typically has over 3,100 pull requests pending review at any given time.
VectorCertain's analysis used three independent AI models—Llama 3.1 70B, Mistral Large, and Gemini 2.0 Flash—that evaluate each pull request separately before fusing their judgments using consensus voting. The platform processed 48.4 million tokens over eight hours at a cost of $12.80, or approximately $0.0037 per pull request analyzed. The complete report is available at https://jconroy1104.github.io/claw-review/claw-review-report.html.
The claw-review tool used for this analysis is open source under an MIT License and available at https://github.com/jconroy1104/claw-review, enabling other projects to conduct similar analyses. VectorCertain's enterprise platform extends the multi-model consensus approach to safety-critical domains including autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, healthcare, and financial services. The company's interactive dashboard for the OpenClaw analysis can be accessed at https://jconroy1104.github.io/claw-review/dashboard.html.
The 2,000 hours of wasted developer time represents just the visible portion of a larger efficiency problem in open-source development. As projects like OpenClaw scale, the inability to identify duplicate contributions before they enter review pipelines creates significant bottlenecks that delay innovation and consume valuable maintainer resources that could be directed toward security improvements and feature development.
