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

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

Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told a SXSW viewers that he’s received “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because he’s so excited to be working with AI brokers.

“I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs that I know have it as well,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (At least, we hope he was joking. AI-induced psychosis can really be a harmful condition.)

“Once you try it, you’ll realize: It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics — I remember, you know, sort of being on modafinil,” he described, referencing the sleep-preventing drug that’s widespread with the startup hustle-culture crowd. (Tan offered his Y Combinator-backed running a blog startup Posterous to Twitter again in 2012.)

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

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

He’s so excited about his brokers 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 “opinionated” Claude Code abilities he developed. Skills are reusable prompts saved in particular “skill.md” information that instruct the AI methods to behave in particular roles or duties.

“I’ve been having such an amazing time with Claude Code, I wanted you to be able to have my *exact* skill setup,” he posted on X. He called his Claude Code setup “gstack.”

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gstack is accessible now at https://t.co/VPvWDzV5c0

Open source, MIT license, let me know if it really works for you. It’s just one paste to put in it in your local Claude Code, and it is a 2nd one to put in it in your repo in your teammates.

— Garry Tan (@garrytan) March 12, 2026

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

In one submit, he gave an instance of how his setup works. First, he will get Claude’s opinion on whether or not a startup concept or feature is a good suggestion utilizing a skill the place Claude acts like CEO. He makes use of another skill to have Claude write the feature as an engineer, and another to review its personal work for bugs and safety points as a code reviewer. Other 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 amassed practically 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” which means people who’ve taken the information to change for themselves.

But shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that prompted a heap of hate, too.

He wrote that a CTO pal told him gstack was “god mode” that immediately discovered a safety flaw in his company’s code and predicted will probably be widely used.

My CTO pal texted me: “Your gstack is crazy. This is like god mode. Your eng review discovered a subtle cross site scripting attack that I don’t even think my team is aware of. I will make a bet that over 90% of new repos from today forward will use gstack.” https://t.co/P7aOFu5wFM

— Garry Tan (@garrytan) March 12, 2026

To quote just a few of the many hater comments that adopted: One founder posted to X: “(1) Garry should be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, that CTO should be fired immediately.”

Vlogger Mo Bitar did a take on gstack called “AI is making CEOs delusional” during which he pointed out that the project was primarily “a bunch of prompts” in a textual content file. The vlogger summarized the frequent grievance: Developers who use Claude Code already have their very own variations of this.

Added one particular person on 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’s proper? Is gstack a uniquely useful strategy to work with Claude Code? Or unremarkable? To discover out, I requested the consultants, including Claude (which, not surprisingly, completely cherished it). I also queried ChatGPT and Gemini, each of which had been surprisingly constructive.

Gstack is a bunch of “reasonably sophisticated prompt workflows, but they’re not ‘magical,’” ChatGPT opined. “The real insight here is that AI coding works best when you simulate an engineering org structure. Not when you just ask: ‘build this feature.’”

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

Claude called gstack “a mature, opinionated system built by someone who actually uses it heavily,” including, “It’s one of the better examples of Claude Code skill design out there.”

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

On Monday, Tan explained in another X submit, “I took modafinil just to stay awake longer to be able to turn the momentary crystalline structures I had in my brain into lines of code before sleep or human distraction turned it to grains of sand. I love coding but I love coding with AI even more. I speak it listens and we create. I see the structure and it is built. There is no more powerful an experience to me than that.”

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

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