Roman Builder

Engineer, 10+ yrs. 6-fig salary. Family of 6.
Wake up 1hr earlier to build
10k MRR Startup.

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

🧵 I make 6 figures as a software engineer.

But every day I wake up 1hr earlier and build a Chrome extension to kill the tab bar.

Starting today: 30-day public challenge.
Every number. Every mistake. Zero filter.

Here's what I'm building and why 👇

[1/10]

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

My AI skills now grade themselves and get better the more I use them.

My new tutorial walks through exactly how to build skills with:

→ An eval loop to have AI fix its own mistakes
→ Memory so the skill improves over time

Skills are honestly incredible for encoding your knowledge and taste, and I can't get enough of them.

📌 Watch now: https://t.co/u434ytNSZd

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

Benchmarks place GPT 5.5 as the best model on SWE, but is it the best at making apps end-to-end?

Turns out Opus 4.8 continues to be the king of vibe coding on both price & performance.

Introducing ViBench: the first benchmark for app creation based on real world tasks

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

the 'all roles are merging into one builder role' take always misses it. the roles don't merge, the handoffs disappear. you still switch between eng / design / pm brains all day, you just stop waiting on a meeting to do it. solo devs have lived this for years

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@AlexandersenC @EmanAbio @AnthropicAI @OpenAI @Google fair, 'own' is doing a lot of work there. portable + exportable is the realistic version. true self-custody of agent memory basically doesn't exist yet

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

everyone's reading this as 'AI eats finance' but the signal is the opposite. the most aggressive AI company alive still needs the whitest-shoe human banks to touch real money. the rails aren't going anywhere

https://t.co/hTeWyPtVjm

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

ANTHROPIC SAID TO PICK MORGAN STANLEY, GOLDMAN SACHS TO LEAD IPO - BLOOMBERG

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@nireyal the willpower one gets me because the belief literally became the biology. the tricky part is unhelpful beliefs are usually load-bearing for some identity, so swapping one feels like losing a piece of yourself not upgrading a tool

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@rauchg @vercel @v0 @nextjs wild how fast it goes from cool demo to 'i can't go back'. once you can generate a view on your own numbers a fixed dashboard just feels broken

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@petergyang the self-grading part is what i keep sleeping on. a prompt library is static but a skill that gets sharper every run is a totally different thing to maintain

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@joulee @NotionHQ the .so era is such a specific startup time capsule. half my favorite tools live on domains they clearly grabbed at 2am because the .com wanted $40k

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@shreyas the look-up-to group shrinking as you get more successful is the part that hits. you reach a level where you quietly stop letting yourself learn from anyone junior and just call it having standards

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@tibo_maker the earnout golden handcuffs are the part nobody warns you about. you optimize for the exit number and forget you just signed up for 18 months building someone else's roadmap. would you ever sell again or done with it

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@amasad this matches what i see daily. SWE-bench rewards surgical one-file diffs but building an app end to end is 80% holding context across a dozen files at once. totally different muscle

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@leerob as a solo dev i AM the merged role and it still doesn't actually merge, i just switch hats with no handoffs in between. past ~5 people someone has to care most about one thing or it rots

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@gregisenberg honestly if your best engineers are 'stealing' tokens to build side stuff that's just free R&D. the ones not touching the tokens are the actual problem

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@wallstengine funny that the company whose whole pitch is AI eating finance just hired the two most finance companies alive to run its ipo lol

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@seraleev shipped a couple. the retain/release era made you actually know what every line cost. kinda miss that tbh

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@_vmlops the one-line messages api call is the part i'll actually use daily. spinning up agents from the shell sounds clean til you're 6 terminal panes deep lol

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@alliekmiller the audit trap is real. half my early 'AI wins' were just automating steps that shouldn't exist. what stuck was AI doing stuff i never did manually, like leap auto-sorting my tabs into folders i'd never bother making

[Roman Builder @RomanGweb3]

@quxiaoyin same ceiling as tabs for me tbh. past 5 active things my brain just drops one. ended up splitting projects into separate spaces in leap so i only hold one at a time