Y Combinator’s CEO Garry Tan told an SXSW audience he’s experiencing “cyber psychosis” and is barely sleeping due to his excitement about working with AI agents.
“I sleep about four hours a night,” he said during an interview with VC Bill Gurley. “I have cyber psychosis, but so do a third of the CEOs I know,” he joked about his AI obsession. AI-induced psychosis can be dangerous.
“Once you try it, you’ll see: it’s like recreating my startup that needed $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, for which I used anti-narcoleptics — I remember being on modafinil,” he said, referencing the sleep-preventing drug popular in startup culture. (Tan sold his Y Combinator-backed blogging startup Posterous to Twitter in 2012.)
Now, AI excites him so much he naturally experiences insomnia.
“I don’t need modafinil with this revolution. I’m up. I slept at 4 a.m., woke up at 8 a.m. I tried to sleep more but couldn’t.” Tan shared, “I’ve got three projects going right now.”
His enthusiasm led him to share his Claude Code (CC) setup on GitHub under an open-source license on March 12. It featured six “opinionated” skills, reusable prompts in “skill.md” files that guide AI in specific tasks.
“I’ve had an amazing time with Claude Code and wanted to share my exact setup,” he posted on X. His setup is called “gstack.”
Gstack is available on Github and has gained traction, going viral on X, trending on Product Hunt, and accumulating nearly 20,000 stars with 2,200 “forks.”
However, Tan faced backlash after a tweet about gstack’s “god mode” features discovering a security flaw in a friend’s company code.
Critics suggested Tan should be embarrassed for tweeting this or that the CTO involved should be fired. Vlogger Mo Bitar critiqued gstack as “a bunch of prompts” that developers could already use with Claude Code.
Despite mixed reactions, experts, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, praised gstack. ChatGPT called it “reasonably sophisticated prompt workflows,” emphasizing AI coding works well with an engineering org structure. Gemini labeled it a “Pro” configuration for correct coding.
Claude described gstack as “a mature system built by an experienced user,” considering it a good example of Claude Code skill design.
In a follow-up X post, Tan admitted to using modafinil to stay alert while coding but said AI coding is more powerful. “I speak, it listens, and we create.”
Tan did not respond to requests for comment.