In the Great Role Confusion of 2026, Boris Cherny at Anthropic came up with these:
Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales
# Jul 3, 2026