I sit down with Kevin Rose for a live screen share where he walks me through “Nylon,” a personal Techmeme-style news engine he vibe-coded to track AI and tech stories. He breaks down how he pulls from RSS, enriches articles with tools like iFramely, Firecrawl, and Gemini, then generates TLDRs and vector embeddings to cluster stories with real nuance. We dig into his “gravity engine,” an editorial scoring system that ranks stories by impact, novelty, and builder relevance. The bigger theme is simple: with today’s models and workflows, a solo builder can ship wild, high-leverage software fast, then refine by cutting features down to the few that matter.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro And What Kevin Plans To Demo
03:10 – Techmeme Breakdown And How Signal Gets Ranked
06:44 – RSS Sources, Ingestion, And The Article Pipeline
11:23 – Winner Selection: RSS vs iFramely vs Firecrawl vs Gemini
13:01 – Why iFramely And Firecrawl, Explained
16:37 – TLDRs, Vector Embeddings, And Why They Beat Keyword Search
19:49 – Task Orchestration With trigger.dev And Retries
24:58 – Clusters: Expanding With Search APIs And Discovery
27:07 – The Gravity Engine: Editorial Scoring Rubric
31:31 – Product Management: Gut, Iteration, And Cutting Features
34:53 – Synthetic Audiences And Personal Software
37:03 – What “Success” Looks Like
43:52 – Retention Mechanics And The Idea Browser Example
47:19 – “Blurred Presence” Blog Project From A 12-Year-Old Idea
50:34 – This the best time to build
51:55 – How To Work With Kevin, DIGG Reboot, And VC Today
Keypoints
I watch Kevin’s end-to-end pipeline for turning messy RSS links into clean, enriched, clustered stories.
Kevin uses a “winner” judge to pick the best source of truth per field (summary, main content, metadata).
Vector embeddings plus clustering unlock meaning-level grouping that keyword search misses.
trigger.dev gives durable background jobs, retries, and observability for a solo builder workflow.
His “gravity engine” acts like an editorial layer that prioritizes novelty, impact, and builder relevance.
The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com
LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/
The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/
FIND ME ON SOCIAL
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg
Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/
Kevin Rose: x: https://x.com/kevinrose
personal website: https://www.kevinrose.com/about
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KevinRose
