Thin Harness, Fat Skills: The New Way To Build Software
In a Nutshell
Gary Tan returned to coding after 13 years, shipping Gary's List—a full-featured, agentic blogging platform with RAG and deep research capabilities—in just 5 days using Claude and $200 in API costs, achieving 400x productivity via token-maxing and directing multiple AI agents. He built GStack, a "thin harness, fat skills" system of markdown prompts, ASCII diagrams, CEO plans, and tools like Codex for reviews/QA, enabling 13 PRs in 48 hours while running YC. Embrace brittle "kit car Ferrari" AI tools, max tokens for completeness over human limits, and prioritize personal control to boil the ocean in software building.
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Using OpenClaw is like driving a Ferrari: exhilarating, it figures out things you would never think a machine could and does it quickly. But like a Ferrari, it breaks down when you need it most, requiring you to fix it yourself as a mechanic. This is an exciting time in computer science and technology.
Gary Tan, after a multi-year hiatus as an investor, returned to building. In the last couple months, he shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of code and built popular open-source projects that went from nothing to more than 100,000 stars on GitHub, while running YC full-time. Many doubt this is possible, but it happened.
I'm relatively shocked myself. It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly boom, I'm doing about 400x the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of two-thirds of the time writing code.
Gary's List began after a Lyon episode. Gary wanted to bring together people who believed what he believed, particularly for California. He started a 501c4, now a C3 and a PAC, to bring together smart people—what he learned is powerful from San Francisco politics, creating a mass social movement.
He made a website to write about issues, starting with wanting children in school to take algebra. In San Francisco public schools, it's not possible and still very hard for a seventh or eighth grader in middle school to take algebra. If he hadn't in East Bay public schools, he wouldn't have studied engineering at Stanford, written code, or done what he has.
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