AI For Dev

gstack

2 min read

GStack

An open-source Claude Code skill set by Gary Tan (President of Y Combinator) that brings YC’s startup-building methodology to solo developers. The goal: give one person the leverage of an entire development team.

What It Is

GStack is not a collection of individual tools — it’s a process. A set of markdown-based prompts that teach Claude Code how to think like different startup roles: CEO, CTO, engineering manager, senior designer, design partner, staff engineer, debugger. Each role gets a dedicated prompt file that focuses the agent on problems through that lens.

The inspiration: Andrej Karpathy saying he hadn’t typed a line of code since December. Gary Tan’s question: “How does one person ship like a team of 20?”

Key Skills

  • /gstack office-hours — Six forcing questions that reframe your product before writing any code, modeled on actual YC office hours
  • /gstack plan — CEO review: rethink the problem, find the “10-star product” (reference to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky)
  • Engineering manager, senior designer, design partner, staff engineer, debugger — role-specific analysis prompts for reviewing a codebase through that lens

Installation

One command: copy the install prompt from the GStack docs and paste into Claude Code. It asks a few questions, requests permissions, and installs.

Why It Matters

GStack is prompt engineering as open-source product. Reading the documentation is reading how Gary Tan actually thinks about startups, YC office hours, product-market fit. Because it’s open source, you can inspect and adapt every prompt.

Adoption

~50,000 GitHub stars within two weeks of launch (as of March 2026). Per the Dubibubii 2026-04 ingest: now at ~40,000 stars (note: Dubibubii’s number is lower than the earlier Berman figure — could reflect a star-count correction, double-counting, or measurement noise; the wiki keeps both as-recorded). TechCrunch covered it and a “this is like god mode” CTO testimonial screenshot went viral. The source frames the skeptical critique (“it’s just prompts in a text file”) as accurate but missing the point — “skills are literally just markdown files, and how you structure your Claude Code environment matters more than most people realize.”

See Also

Graph View

Backlinks