Why Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup has gotten so much love, and hate Julie Bort 1:50 PM PDT · March 17, 2026 Y Combinator’s famed CEO Garry Tan told a SXSW audience that he’s got “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping because he’s so excited to be working with AI agents.
“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 actually be a dangerous 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 popular with the startup hustle-culture crowd . (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startup Posterous to Twitter back in 2012 .)
But now, his psyche is so amped working with AI agents, it’s a natural 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 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 “opinionated” Claude Code skills he developed. Skills are reusable prompts stored in special “skill.md” files that instruct the AI how to behave in specific roles or tasks.
“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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Since then he’s 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 idea using a skill where Claude acts like CEO. He uses another skill to have Claude write the feature as an engineer, and another to review its own work for bugs and security issues as a code reviewer. Other skills cover design, documentation, and so on.
The love for gstack began immediately: His tweet went viral on X and trended on Product Hunt . It’s accumulated nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” meaning people who have taken the files to modify for themselves.
But shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that caused a heap of hate, too.
He wrote that a CTO friend told him gstack was “god mode” that instantly found a security flaw in his company’s code and predicted it will be widely used.
My CTO friend 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
To quote just a few of the many hater comments that followed: One founder posted to X : “(1) Garry should be embarrassed for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, that CTO should be fired immediately.”
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