Y Combinator's CEO Garry Tan released something quietly powerful this week. On March 14, at SXSW, he published his personal Claude Code skill set on GitHub under an MIT license and called it gstack. Within days it had nearly 20,000 stars and 2,000 forks.
Whether you think it's genius or overhyped, gstack tells you something important about where AI-assisted building is heading right now.
What gstack Actually Is
gstack is a collection of Claude Code skills, essentially structured prompts that tell Claude to take on specific roles during development. Each skill is a text file that gives Claude a clear persona, a set of responsibilities, and rules for how to behave.
The initial release had 6 skills. Tan has since added more, bringing the repository to 13 modules. He's been posting about a new feature or skill every day on X.
The core workflow works like this:
- You pitch an idea and Claude (as CEO) evaluates whether it's worth building
- Claude (as engineer) writes the implementation
- Claude (as reviewer) audits the code for bugs and security issues
- Other skills handle design, documentation, and more
It's not magic. But it is a disciplined system for getting consistent, role-aware output from an AI coding assistant.
Why It Blew Up
Tan shared gstack alongside a candid admission: he's sleeping four hours a night, working in a state of intense focus he compared to "cyberpsychosis." He said he doesn't need modafinil anymore because AI work is that stimulating.
That personal framing, a high-profile founder completely consumed by AI-assisted building, landed hard. One user tweeted: "Your engineer review revealed a subtle cross-site scripting vulnerability that my team is unlikely to notice." Product Hunt put it at the top. GitHub stars piled on fast.
The criticism came just as quickly. Multiple developers pointed out that Claude Code already has its own skill system built in. Others noted that if Tan weren't YC's CEO, gstack would never have reached Product Hunt's front page. A vlogger called it "AI makes CEOs illusionists."
ChatGPT called it "moderately complex prompting, but not magic." Gemini called it "professional but for specialists." Claude, predictably, called it "one of the best examples of Claude Code skill design."
What's Actually Useful Here
Forget the hype. The real signal in gstack is the pattern it represents: role-based prompting as a repeatable system.
Most people use AI coding tools reactively. They type a question, get an answer, type another question. gstack flips that: it defines a set of roles upfront, and each role has a clear job to do at a specific point in the build process.
That's a better mental model. When you're building, you're not looking for a generalist. You're looking for a CEO-brain to challenge your assumptions, an engineer-brain to implement, and a reviewer-brain to catch what you missed. Having those as explicit, reusable prompts means you stop improvising your process every time.
How to Use It Right Now
gstack is free, MIT-licensed, and one command away if you're using Claude Code:
- Install locally in one click via the Claude Code skill interface
- Or grab the files directly from the GitHub repo and adapt them to your own workflow
- Tan recommends starting with the CEO skill to validate your idea before writing a single line of code
Even if you don't use Claude Code, the structure of gstack is worth stealing. Take the skill files as templates, rewrite them for your tool of choice, and build your own stack of role-based prompts that you reuse across every project.
What It Means for Vibe Coders
If you're building on Base44 or any AI-first platform, gstack points at something worth taking seriously: the builders who win in 2026 won't just be the ones who prompt well. They'll be the ones who have a system for prompting.
A CEO skill that challenges your idea. An engineer skill that implements it. A reviewer skill that audits it. That's not a shortcut, that's an engineering process, just one that runs in minutes instead of sprints.
gstack is already on GitHub. The real question is what your version of it looks like.
