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

The famous CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, told a SXSW crowd that he has a “cyberpsychosis” and barely sleeps because he is so excited to work with AI agents.

“I sleep about four hours a night now,” he told his interviewer, fellow VC Bill Gurley, during an onstage interview Saturday. “I have cyberpsychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs I know also suffer from it,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (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, which needed $10 million in venture capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I was on anti-narcoleptic drugs — I remember, you know, I was on some kind of modafinil,” he described, referring to the sleep-preventing drug popular with the startup hustle culture. (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startup Posterous to Twitter in 2012.)

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

“I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. Like, I’m awake. I slept at 4 in the morning and woke up at 8,” he said. “I wanted to sleep more, but I couldn’t because, let’s see what’s going on with the ten employees. I have three different projects going on right now.”

He is so enthusiastic about his agents that on March 12, just two days before the interview, he proudly and freely shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub under an open source license. The lineup included six “quirky” Claude Code skills that he developed. Skills are reusable cues stored in special ‘skill.md’ files that instruct 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 use my *exact* skills,” he posted on X. He called his Claude Code setup ‘gstack’.

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

In one post he gave an example of how his setup works. First, he gets Claude’s opinion on whether a startup idea or feature is a good one, using an ability where Claude acts as 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 include design, documentation, and so on.

The love for gstack started immediately: his tweet went viral on X and became popular Product hunt. It has amassed nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” that is, people who have used the files to modify them themselves.

But shortly after gstack’s release, Tan posted a tweet that also generated a lot of hate.

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

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

Vlogger Mo Bitar made a recording of it Called on gstack “AI is making CEOs delusional,” noting that the project was essentially “a bunch of clues” in a text file. The vlogger summarized the common complaint: developers who use Claude Code already have their own versions of it.

One person added 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 unique, useful way to work with Claude Code? Or inconspicuous? To find out, I asked the experts, including Claude (who, unsurprisingly, absolutely loved it). I also surveyed ChatGPT and Gemini, both of which were surprisingly positive.

Gstack is a group of “fairly advanced fast workflows, but they’re not ‘magical,'” ChatGPT opined. “The real insight here is that AI coding works best when you simulate a technical organizational structure. Not when you just ask, ‘build this feature.’”

Gemini called the setup “advanced,” adding that “gstack is essentially a ‘Pro’ setup. It’s 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 a lot,” adding, “It’s one of the better examples of Claude Code skill design out there.”

We take that as a compliment from an expert in this field.

On Monday, Tan explained in another X message“I used modafinil to stay awake longer and turn the instantaneous crystalline 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 speak, it listens, and we create. I see the structure and it is built. There is no more powerful experience for me than that.”

Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.