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Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup
- ed_mercer 6mo agoThe 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.
- archagon 6mo agoThis was flagged. Why did the mods remove flags? How is this anything other than nepotism?
- actualwitch 6mo agoRecently flagged posts that were unflagged: this. Recently flagged posts that are still flagged: Teens sue xAI over Grok's pornographic images of them (bbc.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406721 Turns out the DOGE bros who killed humanities grants are sensitive about it (techdirt.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412848 DOGE didn't cut government waste, it was government waste (techdirt.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415103 Curated Female Founder Cohort in SF (jointheden.co) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418184 At this point I lost any gram of respect I used to hold for the mods here.
- UncleMeat 6mo agoWhen Garry remakes the world into a collection of fiefdoms run by CEO kings, an AI version of dang will be responsible for deciding everybody's "curious conversation."
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rileymichael 6mo ago> 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
- baal80spam 6mo agoOK, I am an AI accelerationist, but this quote... Wow. Are we really back to measuring KLoC?
- therobots927 6mo ago[flagged]
- grvdrm 6mo agoVC investor metric brain. Right?
- therobots927 6mo agoIf you can call a ketamine soaked, amphetamine-fried tangle of nerves a brain.
- grvdrm 6mo agoInteresting. Is he a known user? Also curious if you are more broadly against some of that overall?
- therobots927 6mo agoI don’t know. What I do know is that he shares a similar insane accelerationist / libertarian philosophy that is popular in certain drug-fueled circles within tech. Proof here: https://48hills.org/2024/05/the-alarming-agenda-of-the-big-money-folks-trying-to-take-over-sf/ https://48hills.org/2024/05/the-alarming-agenda-of-the-big-m...
- grvdrm 6mo agoGot it. Thanks for article. Not on West Coast so hearing less about SF things. Don’t see much or anything about the drug part here either - the part I was really curious about.
- the_af 6mo ago> Interesting. Is he a known user? Also curious if you are more broadly against some of that overall? Just in case you're not aware, Garry Tan, then author of TFA, is YCombinator's current CEO and someone who, while cosplaying as a "moderate", at least subscribes to right-wing ideas (some of them pretty fringe, read the article in another comment). Scary times. It's like we are suddenly surrounded by sociopathic tech entrepreneurs CEOs.
- observationist 6mo agoOmg, 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.
- garrettjoecox 6mo agoMissing a satire disclaimer
- toomuchtodo 6mo ago“Gary, this is a text file.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8
- BrokenCogs 6mo agoThis needs to be higher
- drcongo 6mo agoGarry clearly is.
- fdghrtbrt 6mo agoLOL "it's a bunch of files telling Claude to pretend to be different people" I swear that was my analysis as well, verbatim.
- rileymichael 6mo ago>somewhere right now, an LLM is saying 'great work' to a man who just committed a text file to github this is fantastic, my exact thoughts looking at this repo
- input_sh 6mo agoLooking 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%.
- rovr138 6mo ago> five digits before or after the 90%?
- TrainedMonkey 6mo agoYes
- input_sh 6mo agoConsidering he mentions ten sessions at once and I'm pretty confident he wouldn't tolerate waiting for the quota to reset itself... maybe like high four digits with the discount applied, definitely five without it. I could be underestimating both by a digit.
- heliumtera 6mo agoI 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
- sph 6mo agoI’m still hanging around to see it all crumble down honestly. Get the popcorn.
- hnrodey 6mo agoWhy should anyone care about this?
- input_sh 6mo agoFor the same reason I care about Elon Musk's decisions after he purchased Twitter: I want more tech CEOs to publish as much of their bullshit online as possible for people to hopefully realise what their "superhuman productivity" actually looks like in practice.
- fcpk 6mo agoand 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....
- KaiMagnus 6mo agoWell at the current trajectory I'd expect him to release his own OS or something by end of July, his own AWS competitor by October and to close YC applications indefinitely at the end of the year. But for now I'd be fine with him making his repos public.
- MaxLeiter 6mo agoLLM 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/SKILL.md https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/blob/main/plan-ceo-review...
- zkr 6mo agoI am seriously worried about this guy's mental health at this point.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ballooney 6mo agoIn the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code No you haven't.
- the_af 6mo agoNot only he hasn't, writing over 600,000 lines of production code is not something to be proud of. At least not without explaining their purpose and why they were needed. This is a major software engineering lesson that Garry's LLM-addled brain has apparently forgotten: measuring progress in LoC is not something that is done anymore because it's a bad metric!
- vessenes 6mo agoInteresting 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.
- ta-run 6mo agoThis 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_.
- cholantesh 6mo ago[flagged]
- tertius 6mo agoAh yes, use only index fingers to type.
- CactusBlue 6mo agoMostly 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.
- jazzpush2 6mo agoThat'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?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- claudiug 6mo ago[flagged]
- Marciplan 6mo ago[flagged]
- Sherveen 6mo agoAs 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.
- input_sh 6mo agoWow, the astroturfing by other YC-funded CEOs over there in the comments is quite ridiculous.
- arnvald 6mo agoI don't understand how adding an ad to every single skill is a good idea: https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/commit/9d47619e4c721365744c080d27455268ee93ed96#diff-6a4f7054adf950539dfd75a8b4d3220be1b9fe8bb5aa76ea8084f4eba7e10369R40 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/commit/9d47619e4c72136574... It just unnecessarily clutters the context, in EVERY single skill.
- tomjakubowski 6mo agoThe stanza of co-authored byes in the commit message there is just incredible.
- amdolan 6mo ago> There are other people… Would you please share a couple? TIA
- Sherveen 6mo agoCheck out the strats from the Every team: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (I recommend just learning from their builds and doing your own!) Simon Willison's blog: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/ https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
- yumraj 6mo agoI'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.
- rovr138 6mo agoThe best question is, what's been shipped in the past 60 days with those 600,000 lines. Lots of people trying things for the sake of it, without really achieving anything with it. Maybe they have 'a setup' but the setup ends up being unproven.
- 2kdjat 6mo agoI 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
- itsankur 6mo agounderrated comment omg. I can hear Shane/DJT’s voice, amazing.
- the_af 6mo agoAwesome. Remember when we all agreed writing more code was a bad thing? "Code is a liability", Jeff Atwood's posts about it, "lines of code is a bad metric", etc? It seems so far ago, doesn't it? We live in a new reality now. One where MOAR is better and size does matter.
- fzeroracer 6mo agoThe 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.
- madrox 6mo agoI'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.
- cholantesh 6mo ago[dead]
- the_af 6mo agoYour answer reads like a weird mix of AI slop and astroturfing. I took the time to read through your most recent posts, and it tracks with your attitude towards slop in general.
- madrox 6mo agoIs there something you don't like about the substance of my comments? Or is this just name calling? Is this not Hacker News? Aren't AI dev stacks supposed to be interesting to developers? Say what you want about my comments, but at least I'm within bounds of comment guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- xnx 6mo ago[flagged]
- nthngtshr 6mo agoI 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 https://youtu.be/W3YpC4Dvzso?t=929
- therobots927 6mo ago[flagged]
- mizzao 6mo agoCan confirm this experience, as someone who took 10 years to be diagnosed with bipolar type 2 (the median amount of time, unfortunately). But, if he is bipolar, he would have experienced hypomania/mania before. This wouldn't be the first time...
- Jamesbeam 6mo agoWith 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.
- snorrah 6mo agoI think Doll over on bsky has an interesting Claude setup going. Some kind of adversarial mode where they pitch Claude against another model (Gemini, I think) combined with their own “memory” model called Chainlink. They’ve recently started using their AI pipeline to put out rust-based conversions of tools and it seems to be going pretty well.
- satisfice 6mo agoAnyone who brags about how many lines of code he creates has already lost the plot. Is any of it trustworthy?
- possibleworlds 6mo agoNothing in there about network states, taking over areas of the city and putting people in special coloured shirts to mark them as outsiders and then booting them out, etc
- tabs_or_spaces 6mo ago> 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 as a part-time part of my day while doing all my duties as CEO of YC. LOC will never be a good metric of software engineering. Why do we keep accepting this? I can generate 1 million LOC if I really wanted to. As long as LOC is the main metric for these setups, they will never be successful.
- PAndreew 6mo agoLOC is a very-very weak proxy of "how many new features" I've built, and they don't have any other metric that can be measured easily. But it causes serious issues, because equating LOC with productivity leads to inevitable utter bloat, that no agent or human can ever rectify in a meaningful timeframe. I'm pretty sure this 600 000??? LOC could be shrinked to 60 K for the same feature set, but with better readability and performance.
- well_ackshually 6mo ago[flagged]
- kowalej 6mo agoLOL imagine if this guy was your boss. Scary thing is though, my boss is starting to sound like this :D
- gos9 6mo agoWow, HN taking a marketing play at face value. Shocker.
- BigTTYGothGF 6mo agoWhy's a CEO writing code, doesn't he have a company to run?
- UncleMeat 6mo agoBetter to have Garry spend his time writing code than using his wealth to attack the very concept of liberal democracy or screech about college students on his blog.
- toomuchtodo 6mo agoI mean, couldn't Garry spend his time evangelizing YC as providing opportunity to talent that would not otherwise have access to said opportunity instead of either of those? It seems to me like that would be a better use of his time to achieve YC's objectives of funding somewhat competent, highly obsessive, morally flexible founders to create YC portfolio companies others are desperate to invest in at future higher valuations or to acquire. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the purpose of YC though.
- UncleMeat 6mo agoHe could. But he's also being using his wealth and influence to advocate for the destruction of liberal democracy alongside that activity, so I think it would be a net positive for him to fall into an AI psychosis such that he no longer has time to sabotage society.
- coldtea 6mo ago>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 That would be considered a huge liability and shameful historically.
- AdenCJM 6mo ago[dead]