Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup has gotten so mighty esteem, and hate

Y Combinator’s eminent CEO Garry Tan suggested a SXSW viewers that he’s obtained “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because of he’s so angry to be working with AI agents.

“I sleep, esteem, four hours a night merely now,” he suggested his interviewer, fellow VC Invoice Gurley, within the course of an onstage interview Saturday. “I truly possess cyber psychosis, nonetheless I ponder a third of the CEOs that I do know possess it as successfully,” he joked about his latest AI obsession. (No longer no longer as much as, we hope he became once joking. AI-triggered psychosis can if truth be told be a unhealthy situation.)

“Whenever you are making an strive it, you’ll ticket: It’s esteem I became once succesful of re-compose my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 folks, and I labored on that for 2 years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I bear in mind, you perceive, form of being on modafinil,” he described, referencing the sleep-stopping drug that’s original with the startup hustle-tradition crowd. (Tan supplied his Y Combinator-backed running a blog startup Posterous to Twitter back in 2012.)

Nonetheless now, his psyche is so amped working with AI agents, it’s a natural insomnia.

“I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. Love, I’m up. I slept at 4 a.m. I woke up at 8 a.m.,” he mentioned. “I wished to sleep extra, nonetheless I couldn’t because of: Let’s uncover what’s happening with the 10 workers. I’ve obtained esteem three a amount of projects going merely now.”

He’s so thinking about his agents that on March 12, merely two days earlier than the interview, he proudly, freely shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub beneath an launch source license. The setup included six “opinionated” Claude Code talents he developed. Abilities are reusable prompts saved in particular “talent.md” files that sigh the AI learn the solution to behave in particular roles or projects.

“I’ve been having such an unprecedented time with Claude Code, I wished you so that you just have to well possess my *genuine* talent setup,” he posted on X. He known as his Claude Code setup “gstack.”

Since then he’s added numerous extra talents. The gstack GitHub repository currently lists 13, nonetheless it appears to be esteem every hour Tan tweets about one thing contemporary.

In one post, he gave an example of how his setup works. First, he gets Claude’s thought on whether or no longer a startup thought or feature is a correct recommendation the utilization of a talent the build Claude acts esteem CEO. He makes spend of every other talent to possess Claude write the feature as an engineer, and every other to overview its admire work for bugs and security considerations as a code reviewer. Other talents veil accomplish, documentation, etc.

The esteem for gstack began straight away: His tweet went viral on X and trended on Product Hunt. It’s gathered practically 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” which implies folks which possess taken the files to alter for themselves.

Nonetheless quickly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that introduced on a heap of hate, too.

He wrote that a CTO friend suggested him gstack became once “god mode” that straight away found a security flaw in his company’s code and predicted this could well be broadly worn.

To quote merely a couple of of the an excellent different of hater feedback that followed: One founder posted to X: “(1) Garry needs to be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s exact, that CTO needs to be fired straight away.”

Vlogger Mo Bitar did a take on gstack known as “AI is making CEOs delusional” whereby he pointed out that the venture became once truly “a bunch of prompts” in a textual squawk file. The vlogger summarized the original grievance: Developers who spend Claude Code possess already obtained their very admire versions of this.

Added one person on Product Hunt, “Garry, let’s be clear and exact: if you weren’t the CEO of YC, this wouldn’t be on PH.”

So who’s merely? Is gstack a uniquely critical capability to work with Claude Code? Or unremarkable? To search out out, I asked the consultants, including Claude (which, no longer surprisingly, completely cherished it). I moreover queried ChatGPT and Gemini, each of which were surprisingly dart.

Gstack is a community of “moderately subtle suggested workflows, nonetheless they’re no longer ‘magical,’” ChatGPT opined. “The exact insight here is that AI coding works completely in case you simulate an engineering org construction. No longer in case you merely inquire of: ‘produce this option.’”

Gemini known as the setup “subtle,” adding that “gstack is actually a ‘Pro’ configuration. It is much less about making coding more straightforward and extra about making it factual.”

Claude known as gstack “a veteran, opinionated system constructed by anyone who if truth be told makes spend of it heavily,” adding, “It’s one of many greater examples of Claude Code talent accomplish out there.”

We’ll take that as a thumbs-up from an knowledgeable on the subject.

On Monday, Tan defined in every other X post, “I took modafinil merely to tackle wakeful longer so that you just have to well present the non eternal crystalline constructions I had in my mind into traces of code earlier than sleep or human distraction turned it to grains of sand. I esteem coding nonetheless I esteem coding with AI mighty extra. I instruct it listens and we compose. I uncover the construction and it is constructed. There could be now not any extra highly efficient an experience to me than that.”

Tan did no longer answer to a pair of requests for observation.