Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told the SXSW audience that he has “cyber psychosis” and can’t sleep because he’s so excited about working with AI agents.
“I sleep like four hours a night right now,” he told his interviewer, VC Bill Gurley, during an on-stage interview Saturday. “I have cyber psychosis, but I think about a third of the CEOs I know have it too,” he joked about his current AI obsession. (At least, we hope he was kidding. AI-induced psychosis can be a dangerous situation.)
Once you try it, you’ll notice: it’s like I was able to revive my startup it took 10 million dollars in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years, and I took anti-narcoleptics – as I remember, you know, the type of seizure like modafinil, “he explained, referring to the startup of anti-sleep drugs popular with hustle-culture). (Tan sold his blogging startup to Y Combinator sponsored by Posterous, on Twitter back in 2012.)
But now, his mind is very powerful working with AI agents, natural insomnia.
“I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. As I woke up. I went to bed at 4 in the morning and woke up at 8 in the morning,” he said. “I wanted to sleep a lot, but I couldn’t because: let’s see what happens with 10 employees. I have three different projects going on right now.”
He is so happy with his agents that on March 12, just two days before the interview, he proudly shared his Claude Code (CC) setup on Github under an open source license. The setup consisted of six “ideal” skills that Claude Code developed. Skills are reusable commands stored in special “skill.md” files.
“I had a great time with Claude Code, I wanted to be able to set *my exact skill*,” he wrote on X. He called Claude Code’s setup “gstack.”
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Since then he has added several other skills. The gstack GitHub repository currently says there are 13, but it seems like every hour Tan tweets something new.
In another post, he gave an example of how his setup works. First, you get Claude’s opinion about whether the first idea or feature is a good idea to use the skill when Claude acts as CEO. He uses one skill for Claude to write a feature as a developer, and another to review his work for bugs and security issues as a code reviewer. Other skills include cover design, scripts, and more.
The love for gstack started quickly: His tweet went viral on X and trended on Product Hunt. It has reached nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub with 2,200 “forks,” meaning people have taken the files to modify it for themselves.
But shortly after releasing gstack, Tan posted a tweet that caused a lot of hate, too.
He wrote that a CTO friend told him gstack was a “god mode” that quickly found a security flaw in his company’s code and predicted it would be widely used.
To quote just a few of the many haters afterward: One founder tweeted to X, “1) Garry should be ashamed of himself for tweeting this. (2) If it’s true, that CTO should be fired immediately.”
Vlogger Mo Bitar made a gstack called “AI makes CEOs cheat” where he revealed that the project was actually “a bunch of notifications” in a text file. The vlogger summed up a common complaint: developers using Claude Code already have their own versions of this.
Added one person on Product Hunt, “Garry, let’s be clear and honest: if you weren’t the CEO of YC, this wouldn’t be in PH.”
So who is right? Is gstack a useful alternative to working with Claude code? Or unusual? I asked the experts, including Claude (which, not surprisingly, he really liked). I also queried ChatGPT and Gemini, both of which were surprisingly good.
Gstack is a group of “quick workflows that are complex, but not ‘magical,’” ChatGPT highlights. “The real insight here is that AI coding works best when you model the structure of an engineering organization. Not when you just ask: ‘build this feature.’
Gemini called the setup “complex” adding that “gstack is a ‘Pro’ setup. It’s less about making coding easier and more about getting it right.”
Claude called gstack a “mature, intuitive system built by a very active user,” adding, “It’s one of the best examples of Claude Code’s design skills out there.”
We’ll take that as a slap from an expert on the subject.
On Monday, Tan explained in another X post, “I took modafinil just to stay awake longer so that I could turn the temporary crystalline structures I had in my mind into lines of code before I fell asleep or human distraction turned the grains of sand. I love coding but I love coding with AI even more. I speak it listens and builds. I see a structure and it is built beyond what I experience.
Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
