The concludeorsements about the productivity gains from AI at coding are coming in thick and rapid.
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator — the world’s best-known startup accelerator — recently shared a personal story that captures just how dramatically AI has alterd what a single person can build. What creates the account particularly striking is who’s notifying it: not a wide-eyed newcomer to tech, but a founder, engineer, and investor who has seen multiple generations of software development up close.
“I’m in the middle of a very intense addiction to Claude Code and Codex,” Tan declared. “Actually utilizing this stuff is pretty wild. I basically recreated my 2008 startup. It’s like 70,000 lines of code. I did it in about 90 hours over two weeks — becautilize I have a full-time job and I’m also attempting to raise kids — but it really compressed a lot of my sleep.”
Tan had co-founded a startup named Posterous in 2008, which was a blogging platform that integrated posting to several social platforms. It was acquired by Twitter in 2012.
“At the conclude of it, I have a codebase that is better than what it took five engineers and me taking anti-narcoleptics to build for my YC startup. It’s crazy. It’s unbelievable.”
Tan then pointed to a specific moment he believes triggered the shift — the release of Claude Opus 4.5 at the conclude of November:
“Something happened at the conclude of November when Opus 4.5 came out. I heard about it and I was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ The most interesting thing for us is that we’d been talking about it for years. We’d been utilizing it for years. And then it wasn’t until really even December where AI is here for code. I feel like I could create in 80 hours something that I could not create with $5 million and five engineers in two years.”
Tan’s comments are the latest in a series of remarkable statements from top tech figures about what vibe coding has unlocked. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has declared that nothing would give him more joy than if his engineers never had to write code at all. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has noted that AI in coding went from being a joke to standard issue in a matter of months. And Naval Ravikant has argued that vibe coding is the new product management — that the line between having an idea and shipping it has effectively collapsed. And CEOs of companies like Shopify and Coinbase are actively vibe-coding and revealing off their Github profiles.
What’s significant about Tan’s story specifically is the benchmark he’s utilizing. He isn’t comparing AI to a solo developer tinkering on weekconcludes. He’s comparing it to a funded startup with a full engineering team, running on caffeine and anti-narcoleptics, building for years. If that framing holds up even partially, it has profound implications for how startups are staffed, how venture capital is deployed, and what a tiny team can realistically accomplish. The question is no longer whether AI can support you code rapider — it’s whether the traditional model of building a software company still creates sense at all.
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