Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup has gotten so much love, and hate

Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan advised a SXSW viewers that he’s obtained “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 feel a 3rd of the CEOs that I do know have it as properly,” he joked about his present AI obsession. (Not less than, we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis can really be a harmful situation.)

“When you attempt it, you’ll notice: It’s like I used to be capable of 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 keep in mind, you realize, kind of being on modafinil,” he described, referencing the sleep-preventing drug that’s in style with the startup hustle-culture crowd. (Tan offered his Y Combinator-backed running a blog startup Posterous to Twitter again 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 occurring with the ten staff. I’ve obtained like three completely different initiatives going proper now.”

He’s so enthusiastic about his brokers that on March 12, simply two days earlier than 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” information that instruct the AI behave in particular roles or duties.

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

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

In a single put up, 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 overview its personal work for bugs and safety points as a code reviewer. Different abilities cowl design, documentation, and so forth.

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 information to switch for themselves.

However shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that brought about 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 will likely be broadly used.

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

Vlogger Mo Bitar did a tackle gstack referred to as “AI is making CEOs delusional” wherein he identified that the venture was basically “a bunch of prompts” in a textual content file. The vlogger summarized the frequent 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 sincere: if you happen to 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 specialists, together with Claude (which, not surprisingly, completely beloved it). I additionally queried ChatGPT and Gemini, each of which have been surprisingly optimistic.

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 finest once you simulate an engineering org construction. Not once you simply ask: ‘construct this function.’”

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

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

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

On Monday, Tan defined in one other X put up, “I took modafinil simply to remain awake longer to have the ability to flip the momentary crystalline buildings I had in my mind into traces of code earlier than 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’s constructed. There isn’t any extra highly effective an expertise to me than that.”

Tan didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.