🔥 roaster-kit

Roast any developer's public GitHub in the voice of Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Carmack, or six other tech icons. Pure satire. Public data only.

$ roaster torvalds --persona=steve-jobs --spice=spicy

  ┌─ROAST────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │                                                   │
  │  I looked at this GitHub. For a minute.          │
  │  That was enough.                                 │
  │                                                   │
  │  → 1,247 repositories. One. Thousand. Two         │
  │    hundred forty-seven.                           │
  │  → Not one of them has an app icon.               │
  │  → The most-starred repo is literally called      │
  │    "linux". No creativity.                        │
  │                                                   │
  │  Find the one thing worth keeping.                │
  │  Throw everything else away.                      │
  │                                                   │
  └───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What is this

A Claude-powered roast generator that turns anyone's public GitHub footprint into shareable comedy in the voice of a chosen tech persona. Ships three ways:

• Claude Code slash command — /roast grippado --persona=jobs
• Claude skill — drop into ~/.claude/skills/ and any Claude agent can call it
• Standalone CLI — npx roaster-kit grippado

All three share the same core skill. The CLI is a thin wrapper that calls the Anthropic API with the skill injected as the system prompt.

A web version at roast.gripp.link is on the way — paste a GitHub handle, pick your executioner, get roasted in the browser. See Roadmap.

Install

CLI

...

By default, roaster uses Claude Sonnet 4.6 for a good balance of quality and cost. You can opt into Opus with --model=claude-opus-4-7 when you want the premium version.

Works with any Node 20+ package manager. No install needed — run it ephemerally:

# npm
npx roaster-kit <github-username>

# yarn
yarn dlx roaster-kit <github-username>

# pnpm
pnpm dlx roaster-kit <github-username>

Prefer a global install?

npm install -g roaster-kit
yarn global add roaster-kit
pnpm add -g roaster-kit

Then use either roaster or roast as the command name.

Set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY first (get one here). Optionally set GITHUB_TOKEN to raise the GitHub rate limit from 60/hr to 5000/hr.

Choose your provider

By default, roaster-kit uses Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6. You can also use Groq (free tier, 14,400 requests/day, no credit card required):

export GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_...
npx roaster-kit grippado --provider=groq

Groq uses Llama 3.3 70B by default. Quality is competitive with Claude for this task; speed is faster.

Claude Code slash command

# from the repo root
cp slash-command/roast.md ~/.claude/commands/roast.md
cp -r skill/roaster ~/.claude/skills/roaster

Then in any Claude Code session:

/roast grippado --persona=linus --spice=spicy

Claude skill (Claude.ai or any agent)

cp -r skill/roaster ~/.claude/skills/roaster

Then just ask:

"Roast @grippado on GitHub in the style of Steve Jobs"

Personas

Persona	Voice
linus (default)	Kernel-dev rigor applied to side-project chaos. Surgical.
steve-jobs	Taste-based contempt. Cares about naming, not lint.
bill-gates	Memo-era Gates. Metrics. Implied threats.
trump	SNL-parody voice. Superlatives and nicknames. No real politics.
maddog	UNIX greybeard weariness. "Back in my day..."
dhh	Contrarian manifesto. Dismisses the popular AND the obscure.
carmack	Terse Twitter-thread voice. Devastating precision.
terry-davis	Respectful tribute to the philosophical voice only.

Want to add one? See skill/roaster/references/persona-template.md.

Spice levels

• mild — PG-13. Lovingly mocking. Default for anyone flagged as a learner.
• spicy (default) — Reddit-safe. Real jabs.
• nuclear — HBO intensity. Stronger language. Still no identity jokes, ever.

Output formats

• reddit (default) — long-form markdown, ready to paste into r/programming
• twitter — single tweet, ≤280 chars
• linkedin — ironic "humbled to share" motivational post
• terminal — ASCII box for screenshots

Data sources

Roast material comes from public APIs only:

• GitHub (always, anchor source) — profile, repos, languages, commit cadence, READMEs
• npm (optional) — published packages, downloads, dependency counts
• crates.io (optional) — published Rust crates, versions, downloads
• pkg.go.dev (optional) — published Go modules, importers

Add sources with --sources=github,npm,crates,go.

Hard ethical rules

The skill and CLI enforce these without exception:

1. Public data only. No scraping, no private info, no combining sources to dossier someone.
2. Punch up or sideways. Never at identity (race, gender, nationality, religion, sexuality, disability, mental health, appearance).
3. Consent-first for third parties. If you roast someone who didn't opt in, the skill auto-softens and adds a "commissioned by X" attribution.
4. Learners get soft roasts. If the target has <3 public repos or signals they're learning, the skill downshifts to mild and adds an encouraging closer.
5. No fabricated stats. Every number, percentage, year, and quoted bio fragment in the roast traces back to fields in the structured data block — enforced in the system prompt with an explicit allowlist of data paths. The stats footer is the credibility anchor.
6. Nuclear ≠ ethics off. Nuclear unlocks language intensity. It does NOT unlock slurs, identity jokes, or punching down. Ever.

See skill/roaster/references/safety-examples.md for concrete before/after examples.

Example

Reddit format, Linus, spicy (real output on a real profile):

Roasted by Linus Torvalds · spice: spicy

Forty-seven repositories. Forty-one with no description. This is not a portfolio. This is a cache of abandoned attempts.

Three separate dotfiles repos: dotfiles, dotfiles-old, dotfiles-new. That's not version control. That's archaeology. And the dotfiles-new commits are all named "update". Update what. Update what.

73% of commits happen between 10pm and 4am. I'm not saying don't code at night. I'm saying every one of these late-night commits is followed by a morning commit named "fix". The correlation is doing some work.

Pinned a repo with 412 stars that hasn't been touched since 2021. The README promises "v2 coming soon". Soon is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence.

Rewrite. Start over. Or at least delete the ones you're not going to finish.

---

Stats: @user · 47 repos · 39 original · JavaScript 87% · 8y old · night-owl 73%

Generated from public data only. All love, no hate. ❤️ · powered by roaster-kit

Roast yourself first

Before you roast anyone else, roast yourself. It's the rule.

npx roaster-kit $(git config github.user) --spice=nuclear
# or
pnpm dlx roaster-kit $(git config github.user) --spice=nuclear

Roadmap

• v0.1 — Skill + CLI + Claude Code slash command, 8 personas, 4 sources
• v0.2 — roast.gripp.link: web version. Paste a GitHub handle, pick your executioner, get roasted in the browser. Share-as-image. Rate-limited, no-login.
• v0.3 — GitHub Action: grippado/roaster-action — open a PR, get roasted in the PR comments by the persona of your choice. Opt-in per repo.
• v0.4 — More personas (community PRs). Candidates: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Dijkstra, Guido, Rob Pike, the "AI-transformation consultant" satire.
• v0.5 — Team mode: roast a whole GitHub org. For retros that hurt.

FAQ

Is this mean? It's a roast. By design it's pointed. But the skill is built from the ground up to punch at patterns (abandoned repos, hype names, commit cadence) instead of at people. If you want a "soft" version, pass --spice=mild.

What if the target isn't in on it? The skill asks once if the target is third-party and consenting. If not, it keeps the spice low and frames the output as "commissioned by @X" satire. If you want to roast someone who didn't opt in at nuclear spice, the skill will refuse.

Can I add a persona? Yes — drop a markdown file in skill/roaster/personas/ following the template. PRs welcome.

Does this work offline? No — it calls the Anthropic API and GitHub's public API.

How much does it cost per roast? One Claude API call per roast, usually ~2-4k input tokens and ~500-1k output tokens. Call it a fraction of a cent. The GitHub API calls are free (60/hr unauth, 5000/hr with a token).

Why Anthropic and not OpenAI? Built by a heavy Claude Code user, runs on Claude. You can adapt cli/src/prompt.js to any model with a system-prompt API, but the persona calibrations were tuned against Claude.

Contributing

• New persona? Follow persona-template.md and the quality bar in it.
• New data source? Add a collector in cli/src/collectors/ and a matching markdown doc in skill/roaster/collectors/. Public-data-only.
• Fixing a bad roast pattern? Add a before/after to safety-examples.md.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

Credits

Built by Gabriel Gripp — also the person behind FlagBridge, a feature flag platform that takes itself more seriously than this project does.

All roasts are satire. All love, no hate. ❤️