Jared Friedman

Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups.  Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.

I realized something else AI has changed about coding: you don't get stuck anymore. Programming used to be punctuated by episodes of extreme frustration, when a tricky bug ground things to a halt. That doesn't happen anymore.

Today, we're excited to release 10,000 fully AI-designed enhancer sequences for the research community. Axis was prompted to design sequences with targeted activity in one of three widely used cell-lines. AI allows us to explore a vast design space, going beyond the natural genome.

@avysotsky @garrytan @ycombinator @harjtaggar @sdianahu Raw!

@garrytan @snowmaker @ycombinator @harjtaggar @sdianahu RE: startup school application. my most impressive coding agent session is more than 10MB (15MB), and its is not txt or md, its jsonl (codex). I can obviously do some transformations but I think you want it raw, right?

@mntruell Yes, I am excited to dig in!

@snowmaker I think you might be surprised by cursor.com/onboard.

Writing code by hand was walking Using Cursor was getting in a car Claude Code in an existing repo is an airplane Claude Code in a new repo is getting in a rocket

@MehulKalia_ @ycombinator @browser_use It was very good!

🏆 We just won the @ycombinator x @browser_use hackathon ($100k prize pool)! Inspired by GANs, we built browser-brawl.com, an arena where two browser agents compete on a live website, generating rich browser traces for post-training. Built this with the best hackathon partner @HrubyOnRails See the arena: browser-brawl.com Check it out: github.com/RichardHruby/b… Demo below:

Remember the anxiety of launching an overnight job, worrying that it would hit an error in the middle? What a beautiful thing to launch it in claude code, where a benevolent superintelligence watches over it while you sleep.

@bcherny The /batch skill is a huge unlock.

In the next version of Claude Code.. We're introducing two new Skills: /simplify and /batch. I have been using both daily, and am excited to share them with everyone. Combined, these kills automate much of the work it used to take to (1) shepherd a pull request to production and (2) perform straightforward, parallelizable code migrations.

We just went from horse-and-carriage to car. The old manuals still have truth in them, but the whole map of effort, speed, and leverage changed overnight. Building used to mean holding an entire system in your head. A fragile memory palace. A house of cards in biological primate RAM. If you stop, the palace collapses. Dinner, a meeting, a context switch. You come back and it’s glass dust on the floor. That’s why builders can look “antisocial.” It’s not vibes. It’s survival. You’re trying to get the palace out of your head and into code before it evaporates. Then the weird miracle: I type a few paragraphs that barely make sense on reread, and the machine builds the palace anyway. It mirrors the structure. It fills the gaps. It hands it back. The feeling is not “wow productivity.” The feeling is: I am seen. Like the part of you that has been translating yourself for 20 years finally gets understood on first contact. This is why the new skill is not “code faster.” It’s taste, direction, and leadership. Managing a swarm of agents. Running tight loops. Knowing what to ask for. And it brings back something old-school: apprenticeship. We forgot how to teach. Now teaching matters again, because the tools are insane but the mind behind them still has to be trained.

@benjdod In the past, the only bots that were trying to sign up for API accounts were controlled by spammers because there was no good reason to automate this otherwise. So all the API companies have anti-bot defenses. But now the bots are the customers!

@snowmaker True, but there are very good reasons why the process is so strictly gated for humans in the first place.

Even the best developer tools mostly still don't let you sign up for an account via API. This is a big miss in the claude code age because it means that claude can't sign up on its own. Putting all your account management functions in your API should be tablestakes now.

@acoyfellow @zadrz_ai They can try but the browser use tools still lag far behind.

@zadrz_ai @snowmaker They can. They need a browser tool and an email tool. That’s all.

@jake_researcher Good point.

@snowmaker This is a great point. The same applies to SaaS APIs - if your service requires a credit card or human review for signup, you're blocking autonomous agents. Have you seen any tools that handle this well?

@handotdev Strong correlation between this and the best companies.

mintlify YC stats - 8 former YC founders joined - 4 former employees became YC founders extremely proud of the culture we've built where we attract founders and launch new ones

What's interesting about Aurorin is that instead of building an AI chat plugin for existing CAD software, they're building new CAD software from scratch. This would have been impossible before AI coding got good, because Solidworks is 10M lines of code. But it is now plausible for a small team to just rebuild it.

@soho_ca Definitely feels this way.

@snowmaker totally. i think about this quote a lot now. x.com/i/status/20264…

Software engineering changed more in the last 3 months than the preceeding 30 years. Everything about running a software company needs to be rethought from first principles.

@cyantist 🙏 You guys set a good example for how to be legit and whimsical at the same time.

I love people who don't take themselves too seriously. More of this please!

@bcherny Huge. Thank you!

Update to 2.1.50 and let us know what you think! claude.com/product/claude…

Introducing: built-in git worktree support for Claude Code Now, agents can run in parallel without interfering with one other. Each agent gets its own worktree and can work independently. The Claude Code Desktop app has had built-in support for worktrees for a while, and now we're bringing it to CLI too. Learn more about worktrees: git-scm.com/docs/git-workt…

@catheryn_li @Zach_Kamran 🧡 You two were always destined to do great things. Has been awesome to see it happen.

@Zach_Kamran and I actually met at YC, where we spent 4 years working together on YC's software team! It was surreal to be back at the YC office as a founder this time. Thanks @snowmaker for the chat 😄