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Garry Tan

Wiki entityai-bubbleventure-capital ↳ show in map Markdown
title
Garry Tan
type
entity
summary
CEO of Y Combinator since 2023; recent figurehead for the executive AI-agent enthusiasm pattern, popularized "cyber psychosis" framing
tags
ai-bubble, venture-capital
sources
ceo-ai-psychosis
created
2026-04-30
updated
2026-04-30

Garry Tan is CEO of Y Combinator (since 2023) and a designer/engineer turned venture capitalist. He shows up in the wiki as the canonical case of executive AI-agent enthusiasm decoupled from output.

The gstack episode

In March 2026, two days before a SXSW panel with Bill Gurley, Tan open-sourced gstack — a collection of markdown prompt files for Claude Code that he framed as "running a virtual engineering team." He claimed to be shipping 37,000 lines of code per day across five projects while running YC full-time; his CTO called it "god mode." The repo hit 20,000 stars in days.

A developer named Gregorein audited the actual output (covered in ceo-ai-psychosis and Fast Company). Tan's website made 169 server requests (HN: 7), shipped 28 test files to production, loaded 78 JS controllers for features not on the homepage, served 2MB uncompressed PNGs that could have been 300KB, and contained an empty 0-byte file plus a rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page. The "37,000 LOC/day" output was extreme bloat.

The "cyber psychosis" remark

On the SXSW panel Tan said he'd been sleeping four hours a night because he was so excited about AI agents, and claimed roughly a third of the CEOs he knows have the same condition. He called it cyber psychosis. His assistant later said he was joking; the ceo-ai-psychosis author argues he wasn't.

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