Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup sparked so much love and hate | TechCrunch

Famous Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told a Audience SXSW that he suffers from “cyberpsychosis” and barely sleeps because he is so excited to work with AI agents.

“I’m sleeping about four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I suffer from cyberpsychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs I know suffer from it too,” he joked about his current obsession with AI. (At least we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis can actually be a dangerous condition.)

“Once you try it, you’ll realize: It’s like I was able to recreate my startup that took $10 million in venture capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics – I remember, you know, being sort of on modafinil,” he described, referring to the sleep-preventing drug that’s popular with the restless startup culture crowd. (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startup Posterous on Twitter in 2012.)

But now his psyche is so excited by working with AI agents that it’s natural insomnia.

“I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. Like, I’m up. I slept at 4 a.m., woke up at 8 a.m.,” he said. “I wanted to sleep more, but I couldn’t because: let’s see what happens with the 10 workers. I have about three different projects going on right now.”

He’s so excited about his agents that on March 12, just two days before the interview, he proudly freely shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub under an open source license. The setup included six “dogged” skills from Claude Code that he developed. Skills are reusable prompts stored in special “skills.md” files that tell the AI ​​how to behave in specific roles or tasks.

“I had such a great time with Claude Code, I wanted you to be able to have my *exact* skill set,” he said. posted on. He called his Claude Code setup “gstack.”

Since then, he has added several additional skills. The gstack GitHub repository currently lists 13, but it seems like every hour Tan tweets about something new.

In one article he gave an example of how his setup worked. First, he gets Claude’s opinion on whether a startup idea or feature is a good idea using a skill in which Claude acts as a CEO. He uses another skill to have Claude write the feature as an engineer, and another to review his own work for bugs and security issues as a code reviewer. Other skills cover design, documentation, etc.

The love for Gstack started immediately: his tweet went viral on Product hunt. It has accumulated almost 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks”, that is, people who took the files and modified them themselves.

But shortly after posting Gstack, Tan posted a tweet that also caused a lot of hate.

He wrote that a CTO friend told him that gstack was a “god mode” that instantly discovered a security hole in his company’s code and predicted it would be widely used.

To name just a few of the many hateful comments that followed: A founder posted on: “(1) Garry should be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, this CTO should be fired immediately.”

Vlogger Mo Bitar made a catch on gstack called “AI Makes CEOs Illusory,” in which he points out that the project was essentially “a set of prompts” in a text file. The vlogger summed up the common complaint: developers who use Claude Code already have their own versions of it.

Adding a person to Product hunt“Garry, let’s be clear and honest: if you weren’t the CEO of YC, this wouldn’t be on PH.”

So who is right? Is Gstack a particularly useful way to work with Claude Code? Or banal? To find out, I asked experts, including Claude (who, unsurprisingly, loved it). I also surveyed ChatGPT and Gemini, both of which were surprisingly positive.

Gstack is a group of “reasonably sophisticated prompt workflows, but they’re not ‘magic,'” ChatGPT said. “The real benefit here is that AI coding works best when you’re simulating an engineering organizational structure. Not when you’re just asking, ‘build this feature’.”

Gemini called the setup “sophisticated,” adding that “gstack is essentially a ‘Pro’ setup. It’s less about making coding easier and more about making it right.”

Claude called gstack “a mature, opinionated system, built by someone who uses it a lot,” adding: “It’s one of the best examples of Claude Code skill design. »

We will consider this an endorsement from a subject matter expert.

On Monday, Tan explained in another Message“I took modafinil just to stay awake longer so I could turn the momentary crystal structures I had in my brain into lines of code before sleep or human distraction turned them into grains of sand. I love coding but I love coding with AI even more. I talk, I listen, and we create. I see the structure and it builds. There is no more powerful experience for me than that.”

Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.