Related ToolsClaude Code

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan Open-Sources His Claude Code Workflow

Claude by Anthropic
Image: Anthropic

Garry Tan, Y Combinator's CEO, has published the Claude Code configuration he uses daily as an open-source toolkit called gstack. The idea is simple but opinionated: instead of treating Claude Code as one general-purpose assistant, gstack splits it into six specialist roles you switch between with slash commands.

The six modes each adopt a different professional mindset:

  • /plan-ceo-review acts as a founder, questioning whether you're building the right thing before worrying about how
  • /plan-eng-review thinks like an engineering manager, producing architecture diagrams and data flow plans
  • /review plays staff engineer, hunting for production-threatening bugs like race conditions
  • /ship handles release engineering - syncing branches, running tests, opening PRs
  • /browse launches a persistent Chromium browser for visual QA testing
  • /retro analyzes your commit history and generates performance retrospectives

The core argument, as Tan puts it in the repo: "planning is not review. Review is not shipping. Founder taste is not engineering rigor." Each mode loads different instructions that constrain how Claude approaches the problem, which tends to produce better results than asking one generic assistant to do everything.

On the technical side, gstack requires Bun v1.0+ and compiles a ~58MB Playwright-based browser binary for the QA mode. Installation runs through Claude Code itself - you paste a setup command and it handles cloning, symlinking skills into ~/.claude/skills/gstack/, and compiling the browser. There's also a project-level install option that copies everything into .claude/skills/ so teammates get the same setup automatically when they clone the repo.

This fits a pattern we're seeing more of: experienced developers publishing their Claude Code and Cursor configurations as shareable toolkits rather than keeping them as personal dotfiles. The MIT license means you can fork it and adapt the prompts to your own workflow.