Peng Builds

Building AI apps & shipping ideas into the world.
Indie maker sharing products, experiments, wins, and lessons along the way.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

Western Japanophilia has always had an information asymmetry at its core.
For decades, the West consumed Japan’s most exportable products — Nintendo, anime, design, food, architecture, hospitality — while ordinary Japanese social and political discourse remained largely behind a language wall.
Tourists see the interface, not the operating system.
Tokyo’s cleanliness, safety, infrastructure and social order are genuinely extraordinary. But order is not the same thing as moral superiority, and politeness is not proof of universalism. Every highly ordered society has trade-offs, exclusions and historical contradictions that are invisible during a two-week vacation.
Japan is worth admiring. It is also worth seeing whole, rather than turning it into a civilization-sized theme park.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@MarioSaputra My first APP has been rejected for 4 times.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@tim_cook @lidangzzz One concrete way to show that love to developers: fix App Store Connect. We need preflight validation, actionable errors, and transparent app/IAP/subscription states. Today, we wait days to learn an optional asset is invalid, then get: “An error occurred. Please try again.”

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

App Store Connect is not a submission system. It’s an escape room with a review queue.

Upload an optional IAP image. Don’t even enable promotion. Wait days. Get rejected because two images are “promotional” and too similar. Remove them. Then App Store Connect refuses to re-add the subscriptions with: “An error occurred. Please try again.”

No preflight validation. No actionable error. Just another queue.

This isn’t App Review. It’s developer endurance testing.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@Jeppesensong @Jackywine 基本上没有了

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@gerardsans Don’t give AI a task. Give it a goal and a test suite.
“Keep going until every TypeScript test passes.”
Nobody wrote the compiler correctly on the first prompt — including humans.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@IndieBeaverHere What was the biggest growth lever that got you from $0 to $6k MRR?

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@thsottiaux One tiny ChatGPT/Codex UX issue that drives me insane:
Open an old thread → randomly lands somewhere in the middle → scroll forever to reach the latest message.
Please. Just. Open. At. The. Bottom.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@signulll The weird part is that I can now code for 10 hours without feeling mentally exhausted.

But I can also create 10 hours worth of bad architectural decisions in 30 minutes.

AI removed the fatigue.

It also removed one of the natural speed limits on bad decisions.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

The most important question before building an AI product in 2026:

“Why can’t the user just do this in ChatGPT?”

If your answer is:

“Mine has a nicer UI”

don’t build it.

Your biggest competitor isn’t another startup anymore.

It’s no app at all.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

Coming up with a startup idea: hard.

Coming up with a good name: harder.

Finding the .com available: impossible.

Finding the .ai available: also impossible.

At this point I’m convinced every decent domain name was registered in 2017.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@euboid @stripe Cool

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@sama So… should I be selling my Nvidia stock?

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

Every time I open X:

19: started a company
23: $1M ARR
28: retired

Me at 36: trying to figure out how to get 100 people to use my app.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@markproduct Posting is part of operating a company.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@pmitu Taste and intuition.

Intelligence is becoming cheap. Judgment isn’t.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

I just realized how absurdly overrepresented Scandinavians are in programming history:

🇩🇰 C++ — Bjarne Stroustrup
🇩🇰 C# / TypeScript — Anders Hejlsberg
🇩🇰 PHP — Rasmus Lerdorf
🇩🇰 V8 / HotSpot — Lars Bak
🇫🇮 Linux / Git — Linus Torvalds
🇫🇮 MySQL — Michael Widenius
🇫🇮 SSH — Tatu Ylönen
🇳🇴 Simula — basically the birthplace of OOP
Denmark has ~6M people.
Finland has ~5.6M.

What is going on up there?
And who am I missing? 👇

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@zdogmode AI might standardize syntax, it won’t standardize taste.

And increasingly, taste is the bottleneck.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@sattyyouneed Luna max is stupid btw. I'd recommend Using Terra instead.

[Peng Builds @pengbuilds]

@sattyyouneed Switch to Terra