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

At SXSW, Garry Tan said he has 'cyber psychosis' and sleeps about four hours a night because he’s excited about AI agents.

“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”

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'I sleep, like, four hours a night right now,' he told interviewer Bill Gurley, adding that he 'have cyber psychosis.'

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He described how AI lets him 're-create my startup' and joked about not needing sleep to chase multiple projects.

On March 12, two days before the SXSW interview, he posted his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub under an open source license, calling it 'gstack' and describing six 'opinionated' Claude Code skills.

The gstack repository has since expanded to 13 skills, with Tan regularly adding more, and the project went viral, accumulating nearly 20,000 stars and 2,200 forks on GitHub and trending on Product Hunt.

Reaction to gstack after its release was mixed and often harsh on X and Product Hunt.

A CTO friend described gstack as 'god mode' that instantly found a security flaw in his company’s code, and one commenter wrote, 'Garry should be embarrassed for tweeting this' (and suggested the CTO should be fired if true).

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Vlogger Mo Bitar mocked the project in a video titled 'AI is making CEOs delusional,' arguing the effort amounts to 'a bunch of prompts' in a text file.

Product Hunt comments questioned whether Tan’s YC CEO status explains the attention.

Tan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Experts offered tempered praise: Claude described gstack as 'a mature, opinionated system built by someone who actually uses it heavily' and 'one of the better examples of Claude Code skill design.'

“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”

TechCrunch

ChatGPT and Gemini were surprisingly positive: ChatGPT argued that the real insight is that AI coding works best when you simulate an engineering org structure rather than just asking to 'build this feature,' while Gemini called the setup 'sophisticated' and a 'Pro' configuration focused on correctness.

The piece frames gstack as a powerful, open-source AI-driven coding workflow rather than a magical gimmick, illustrating ongoing debates about how such tools should be used in startups.