Y Combinator
13 things Y uses or recommends, from 10 episodes.
Y's top picks
What Y uses or recommends most, ranked by how often and how strongly. Paid ads are left out.
Uses and recommends it · 1 episode
"QM — there at YC we had this general agent that we use and they came out with QM a month ago and it is meaningfully better and is so functional and I use it every day."
Uses and recommends it · 1 episode
"Codex 5.5 is now good enough. You can oneshot most simple internal software dashboards to a pretty high level of quality. I tried it over the weekend on a bunch of our stuff. It's just unreal."
Recommends it · talked about in 2 episodes
"If you're building a stable coin, I would highly recommend applying to Y Combinator."
Recommends it · 1 episode
"And then the Reiner Pope and Dwarkesh one I thought was just super, super cool and super good."
Recommends it · 1 episode
"If you want to learn more, I think the two best lectures I've seen on this: Percy gives an amazing lecture, his lecture 10 on CS 336, LLMs from scratch."
Recommends it · 1 episode
"If you haven't tried Claude Code in the last month, it's time to give it another shot. And if you have, you know what I'm talking about. It feels like AGI is here."
What Y warns against
Things Y says to avoid or be careful with. Other experts don't always agree.
"it chose Whisper V1, which is a model from several years ago. Like, the API is practically deprecated... It was like literally takes an hour to process an hour of video"
"It's better than Siri and I'm like, why isn't Siri terrible? Siri so bad. Even just the voice input on it is so bad."
Experts most like Y Combinator
They use many of the same things Y does. Pick the ones you trust and see what they all swear by.
All 13 of Y's picks
- QM Uses and recommends it "QM — there at YC we had this general agent that we use and they came out with QM a month ago and it is meaningfully better and is so functional and I use it every day." Only Y
- Codex Uses and recommends it "Codex 5.5 is now good enough. You can oneshot most simple internal software dashboards to a pretty high level of quality. I tried it over the weekend on a bunch of our stuff. It's just unreal." +87 others
- Y Combinator Recommends it 2 episodes "If you're building a stable coin, I would highly recommend applying to Y Combinator." +17 others
- Claude Code Uses it "By then a lot of our engineers started using Claude Code and Codex. And we realized that you could pretty easily run these in a VM. And then we hooked that up to a Slack tag, which was a pretty powerful medium for people who just wanted to like run a one-off code change." +90 others
- Hermes Agent Uses it "We ended up provisioning a fleet of 50 plus Hermes agents that were running in VMs. These were definitely pretty helpful but they required a lot of configuring for people to get value out of them. It was just inherently kind of difficult to manage this fleet — a whack-a-mole situation where I would have to SSH into these individual instances and fix them." +11 others
- Open Claude Uses it "In January of this year a lot of the partners started using OpenClaude and one thing to know about YC partners is that they're incredibly busy. OpenClaude was useful because it was the first agent that a lot of them had used that had its own computer and so this made it very customizable in a way that the previous paradigm of agents was not. It functioned almost like a personal assistant." Only Y
- Google Analytics Uses it "I wired this up to Y Combinator's Google Analytics and Google Search Console and pulled in all the data. And what was cool is that right out of the box without me having to do anything other than click through a couple of OAuth flows, it was able to give me a full SEO report with a bunch of suggestions for the site." +4 others
- LoRA Uses it "I started playing around with LoRA. I think LoRA at lower ranks for lower amounts of sample size actually does impressively well" Only Y
- VB6 Uses it "I learned to program on VB6 and that's to me that's a real you know this idea of the tools opening up and making making it possible for people that couldn't code. I couldn't code. I learned to code in VB6." Only Y
- Dwarkesh Podcast Recommends it "And then the Reiner Pope and Dwarkesh one I thought was just super, super cool and super good." +1 other
- Stanford CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch Recommends it "If you want to learn more, I think the two best lectures I've seen on this: Percy gives an amazing lecture, his lecture 10 on CS 336, LLMs from scratch." Only Y
- Claude Recommends it "If you haven't tried Claude Code in the last month, it's time to give it another shot. And if you have, you know what I'm talking about. It feels like AGI is here." +212 others
- Groq Recommends it "You should be using Groq with a Q. It's literally 200 times faster... and it's also 10x cheaper" Only Y