Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup has gotten a lot love, and hate


Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan advised a SXSW audience that he’s bought “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping as a result of he’s so excited to be working with AI brokers.

“I sleep, like, 4 hours an evening proper now,” he advised his interviewer, fellow VC Invoice Gurley, throughout an onstage interview Saturday. “I’ve cyber psychosis, however I believe a 3rd of the CEOs that I do know have it as nicely,” he joked about his present AI obsession. (A minimum of, we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis can actually be a dangerous condition.)

“When you strive it, you’ll understand: It’s like I used to be ready to re-create 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 recognize, form of being on modafinil,” he described, referencing the sleep-preventing drug that’s popular with the startup hustle-culture crowd. (Tan offered his Y Combinator-backed running a blog startup Posterous to Twitter back in 2012.)

However now, his psyche is so amped working with AI brokers, it’s a pure insomnia.

“I don’t want modafinil with this revolution. Like, I’m up. I slept at 4 a.m. I awakened at 8 a.m.,” he stated. “I needed to sleep extra, however I couldn’t as a result of: Let’s see what’s going on with the 10 employees. I’ve bought like three completely different tasks going proper now.”

He’s so enthusiastic about his brokers that on March 12, simply two days before the interview, he proudly, freely shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub beneath an open supply license. The setup included six “opinionated” Claude Code abilities he developed. Abilities are reusable prompts saved in particular “talent.md” recordsdata that instruct the AI how to behave in particular roles or duties.

“I’ve been having such an incredible time with Claude Code, I needed you to have the ability to have my *actual* talent setup,” he posted on X. He known as his Claude Code setup “gstack.”

Techcrunch occasion

San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026

Since then he’s added a number of extra abilities. The gstack GitHub repository presently lists 13, but it surely looks as if each hour Tan tweets about one thing new.

In a single publish, he gave an instance of how his setup works. First, he will get Claude’s opinion on whether or not a startup thought or function is a good suggestion utilizing a talent the place Claude acts like CEO. He makes use of one other talent to have Claude write the function as an engineer, and one other to evaluate its personal work for bugs and safety points as a code reviewer. Different abilities cowl design, documentation, and so on.

The love for gstack started instantly: His tweet went viral on X and trended on Product Hunt. It’s accrued almost 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” that means individuals who have taken the recordsdata to modify for themselves.

However shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that brought on a heap of hate, too.

He wrote {that a} CTO buddy advised him gstack was “god mode” that immediately discovered a safety flaw in his firm’s code and predicted it is going to be broadly used.

To cite just some of the many hater feedback that adopted: One founder posted to X: “(1) Garry ought to be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, that CTO ought to be fired instantly.”

Vlogger Mo Bitar did a take on gstack called “AI is making CEOs delusional” through which he identified that the mission was basically “a bunch of prompts” in a textual content file. The vlogger summarized the widespread criticism: Builders who use Claude Code have already got their very own variations of this.

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

So who’s proper? Is gstack a uniquely helpful approach to work with Claude Code? Or unremarkable? To seek out out, I requested the consultants, together with Claude (which, not surprisingly, completely beloved it). I additionally queried ChatGPT and Gemini, each of which have been surprisingly constructive.

Gstack is a gaggle of “moderately refined immediate workflows, however they’re not ‘magical,’” ChatGPT opined. “The actual perception right here is that AI coding works greatest once you simulate an engineering org construction. Not once you simply ask: ‘construct this function.’”

Gemini known as the setup “refined,” including that “gstack is basically a ‘Professional’ configuration. It is much less about making coding simpler and extra about making it appropriate.”

Claude known as gstack “a mature, opinionated system constructed by somebody who truly makes use of it closely,” including, “It’s one in every of the higher examples of Claude Code talent design on the market.”

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

On Monday, Tan defined in one other X post, “I took modafinil simply to keep awake longer to have the ability to flip the momentary crystalline buildings I had in my mind into traces of code before sleep or human distraction turned it to grains of sand. I like coding however I like coding with AI much more. I communicate it listens and we create. I see the construction and it is constructed. There is no extra highly effective an expertise to me than that.”

Tan did not reply to a number of requests for remark.






Disclaimer: This article is sourced from external platforms. OverBeta has not independently verified the information. Readers are advised to verify details before relying on them.

0
Show Comments (0) Hide Comments (0)
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Stay Updated!

Subscribe to get the latest blog posts, news, and updates delivered straight to your inbox.