Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup

As I said on Product Hunt (which upset Garry quite a lot) --

If he weren't the CEO of YC, this wouldn't be on PH, and it wouldn't be on HN.

This is not an impressive setup, folks. It's overengineered and deeply into its own form -- it will not make your agents better, and is likely to make it worse. There are lots of other people to follow/learn from/mimic for skills/context engineering.

This is doing more to keep me away from "vibe coding" than anything else. Look, I'm genuinely interested in using AI as a tool and trying to boost my productivity in any way possible - I equate this to activities from the past like learning shortcuts of my editor, learning to type fast, and so on - but, the almost persuasive nature of this README, just pushes me away.

Not to mention using lines of code as a metric of usability is just _whatever_.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this pattern a couple of times with close friends: they get obsessed with a topic, their sleep falls apart, they seem manic, and eventually they start doing really strange things online and crash and burn. They usually recover, but by then a lot of relationships are damaged and they’re left with a lot of shame.

Now I know these are symptoms of bipolar disorder/psychosis (they both eventually got professional treatment and told me much later), and I wish I’d known at the time so I could’ve helped. He’s bragging about sleeping 4 hours and joking about having cyber psychosis. [0]

Sleeping only 4 hours is a classic mania symptom.

I’m not as close to Garry, so I don’t know for sure, but some of the behavior feels very similar to what I’ve seen in my friends.

I hope Garry has people in his life who can help. At the very least, you have to sleep — poor sleep is strongly correlated with psychiatric conditions.

[0] https://youtu.be/W3YpC4Dvzso?t=929

Looking at the README file, my first question would be what's his monthly API bill, with my second question being how much of a discount does he get as the CEO of Ycombinator.

My guesses would be five digits and 90%.

I've been using Claude code for a while, probably written close to 100K+ lines over several months.

It is always a learning exercise to see how other people are using CC and I'm sure I'll learn a lot from this, so thanks for sharing it.

But, I don't understand what 600,000 lines in 60 days mean. Lines of code is one thing, but to do what? There still needs to be a loop where CC generates code, there is test automation, maybe do some code review, and then test/run to see what it's built and if it matches the spec, refine the spec, provide new guidance and so on. Products are not built in isolation and are not just KLoC.

Now, if I were asking CC to, take the Algorithms text book and write all the code in all the language etc. (as an example) 600 KLoC over 60 days would make sense. If it were porting an existing product from one stack to another, maybe. But for new products, at least to me that part doesn't make sense.

Missing a satire disclaimer

That's an absolute insane amount of code 'created', but the natural follow up is: for what? Are there examples of what this software has created?

LLM generated READMEs hurt my eyes

But maybe there is some cool stuff here. A lot of prolific AI-assisted engineers I know have their own advanced plan modes, and the CEO plan mode in the repo is interesting (although very token heavy)

https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/plan-ceo-review...

and where's the result? LOC as a side a measure of success is typical for the "omg LLM are amazing and can do it all phase" but once you enter the "actually shipping products people want with human complexity and experience meltdowns" it's usually different....

Omg, this is like god mode.

edit: There's a few funny threads on other social media. Honestly, though, let a guy get excited, when you find new ways of using new tech; he's one of the lucky 10,000 who has discovered prompt scaffolds. There are better, bespoke tools for more targeted tasks.

Interesting to compare this to Gastown. I also have been starting with a design mode, but I have been doing the ceo side myself. I also rely almost solely on codex for audit - Claude is just too eager and optimistic to make a good auditor.

Why should anyone care about this?

Mostly just markdown-based skills. I've personally had more luck with harnesses, preconfigured permissions, and scripts to automate the frequent workflows, and the repo seems pretty light on that.

I've been using gstack for the last few days, and will probably keep it in my skill toolkit. There's a lot of things I like. It maps closely to skills I've made for myself.

First, I appreciate how he implemented auto-update. Not sure if that pattern is original, but I've been solving it in a different-but-worse way for a similar project. NOT a fan of how it's being used to present articles on Garry's List. I like the site, but that's a totally different lane.

The skills are great for upleveling plans. Claude in particular has a way of generating plans with huge blind spots. I've learned to pay close attention to plans to avoid getting burned, and the plan skills do a fair job at helping catch gaps so I don't have to ralph-wiggum later. I don't find the CEO skill terribly effective, but I do like the role it plays at finding delighters for features. This is also where I think my original prompting tends to be strong, which could be why it doesn't appear to have a huge impact like the other skills.

I think the design skills are great and I like the direction they're going. DESIGN.md needs to become a standard practice. I think it's done a great job at helping with design consistency and building UIs that don't feel like slop. This general approach will probably challenge lots of design-focused coding tools.

The approach to using the browser is superior to Claude's built-in extension in pretty much every way (except cookie management). It's worth it for that alone.

For people who don't understand this...think of each skill like a phase of the SDLC. The actual content, over time, will probably become bespoke to how your team builds software, but the steps themselves are all pretty much the same. All of this is still early days, so YMMV using these specific skills, but I like the philosophy.

The problem with this is that it all runs local on someone's computer, whereas with openclaw you can involve your teammates (e.g. on slack) which is much more powerful.

We need to stop paying attention to rich people.

I am seriously worried about this guy's mental health at this point.

This reads like a a child telling you about their toys and making up fun little stories about how they all interact together. Or showing you their Minecraft server. How about you explain why anyone should care about this Gary, and no, lines of code aren’t a good reason.

With that state of mind Gary will be in charge of the FBI in a matter of days. Watch out Kash, there is a new weirdo in town and he got +10 to AI Psychosis.

The way the whole repo is written it’s like he thinks he is the messAIah. We are all getting sold glass marbles.

Get some damn sleep Gary.

> In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code — 35% tests — and I am doing 10,000 to 20,000 usable lines of code per day

and what is there to show for it? absolutely terrible metric

I have written 600 THOUSAND lines of production code. The best and most beautiful production code. The agents negotiate. They want to make a DEAL. I am the best deal maker in the world. Thank you for your attention to this matter! -- GJT

In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code

No you haven't.

I swear to God I'm making a script to write \n to a file and call it productivity increase on social media.

What a disgrace, hacker culture died to this

The speed with which LLMs rot peoples brains is really quite stunning. This is just one of the many reasons why I can't trust anyone whose holding the bag for AI stuff, anyone knee deep in this mess is likely unable to see the horizon.

He's such a basic person

“Gary, this is a text file.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8

is this https://theonion.com/ article here?

jesus christ...