Key facts
- Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said he spends about $100,000 to $200,000 a year on AI tokens.
- Tan uses AI agents for work projects, coding tasks and personal organisation.
- He has shared a set of 23 Claude Code skills called gstack on GitHub.
- Y Combinator runs an internal AI agent named Stray Light with a company brain.
- Tan said AI agents are too expensive right now for widespread adoption.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said he spends roughly $100,000 to $200,000 a year on AI tokens, putting a figure on his heavy use of AI agents in an episode of Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders set to publish on Tuesday.
Tan said he deploys agents across numerous work projects and coding tasks, and has published his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on GitHub to show others what agents can do. His agent also handles personal administration: he said it has read all of his email, his Dropbox and his Apple Notes, including therapy notes going back 20 years.
He described the appeal of agents as help with "almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life, and for it to do it somewhat more autonomously," likening the experience to a constant companion that knows the user and anticipates needs. As an early OpenClaw adopter now acting as a power user, Tan said agents should not be treated like traditional software, arguing that excessive concern with repeatability and safety can sacrifice the best parts of working with a system that can resemble a human.
Y Combinator itself is using an agent that Tan said is "rebuilding the way we operate at YC." The internal agent, named Stray Light, has a personality and a company brain holding the total context of every founder the accelerator has backed, everyone who has emailed it and all applications.
Tan said personal AI agents will only become mainstream once costs come down. "It's too expensive right now," he said, acknowledging that his own spending is "a crazy privilege that not everyone can do." He also questioned whether free agents controlled by big tech are the answer, saying of Meta that it is "a huge company that controls the algorithm, and we all wish that they didn't at some level," and suggesting a personal AI that users control and program.