Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told the SXSW audience that he suffers from “cyber-psychosis” and is so excited to be collaborating with AI agents that he can barely sleep.
“I sleep about four hours a night now,” he told fellow VC Bill Gurley during an on-stage interview Saturday. “I suffer from cyberpsychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs I know suffer from cyberpsychosis.” He joked about the current obsession with AI. (At least I hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis may actually be a dangerous condition.)
“Once you try it, you’ll realize: It’s like being able to reinvent a startup that required $10 million in VC capital and 10 people. I was doing that for two years and I was on anti-narcolepsy medication. I remember taking some kind of modafinil,” he explained, referring to the anti-sleep drug popular with the startup’s hustle culture crowd. (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startup Posterous to Twitter in 2012.)
But now his mind is so consumed with working with AI agents that he’s become a natural insomniac.
“This revolution doesn’t need modafinil. It’s like, I woke up. I went to bed at 4 a.m. and woke up at 8 a.m.,” he said. “I wanted to sleep more, but I couldn’t. Let’s see what’s happening with the 10 workers. We have three different projects going on right now.”
He was so excited about his agent that on March 12th, two days before our interview, he proudly shared his Claude Code (CC) setup for free on GitHub under an open source license. The setup included six “opinionated” Claude Code techniques he developed. Skills are reusable prompts stored in a special “skill.md” file that instruct the AI how to operate in a specific role or task.
“I had such an amazing time with Claude Code. I wanted you to have my *exact* technical setup,” he posted on X. He called his Claude Code setup “gstack”.
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Since then, he’s added a few more techniques. The gstack GitHub repository currently lists 13, but it seems like Tan is tweeting about a new one every hour.
In one post, he gave an example of how his setup works. First, Claude uses his acting-like-a-CEO technique to get Claude’s opinion on whether the startup idea or feature is a good idea. He uses another skill to have Claude write features as an engineer, and another skill to have him review his own work for bugs and security issues as a code reviewer. Other skills include design, documentation, etc.
My love for gstack started immediately. His tweet went viral on X and gained popularity on Product Hunt. GitHub has accumulated nearly 20,000 stars with 2,200 “forks.” This refers to people who took the file to modify it themselves.
However, shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that sparked a lot of hate.
He wrote that a CTO friend told him that gstack was a “god mode” that would immediately spot security flaws in his company’s code and predict that it would be widely used.
To quote a few of the many hateful comments that followed: One founder posted the following to
Vlogger Mo Bitar’s comment about gstack, “AI is making CEOs deluded,” pointed out that the project is essentially “a bunch of prompts” in a text file. The vlogger summarized the common complaints: Developers using Claude Code already have their own version of this.
Added one person to Product Hunt. “Garry, let me be clear and honest: If you weren’t the CEO of YC, this wouldn’t have been published in PH.”
So who is right? Is gstack a unique and useful way to work with Claude Code? Or is it not noticeable? To find out, we asked experts, including Claude (who, not surprisingly, he really liked). I also contacted ChatGPT and Gemini and both were incredibly positive.
Gstack is “a reasonably sophisticated group of prompted workflows, but it’s not ‘magic,'” ChatGPT said. “The real insight here is that AI coding works best when simulating engineering organizational structures, not when simply asking, ‘Build this feature.’”
Gemini called the setup “sophisticated,” adding, “gstack is essentially a ‘pro’ configuration. It’s less about making coding easier and more about getting it right.”
Claude called gstack “a mature, opinionated system built by someone who actually uses it a lot,” adding, “It’s one of the better examples of Claude Code technical design.”
Let’s get some recommendations from experts on the topic.
On Monday, Tan said in another
Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
