Folks are all in a tizzy because a guy posted some Markdown files on GitHub.
Mind you, it’s not just any guy, and they aren’t just any Markdown files.
The guy is Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, which is among the most widely known startup incubator and venture capital firm in tech. Garry is a long-time builder, having founded the blogging platform Posterous.
The Markdown files? Tan created what he calls gstack — a collection of Claude Code skills that help to focus Claude in on the specific steps of developing a software product. And, yes, they are done in Markdown. Just a bunch of text files. Some love it, and some are … not so impressed.
A little Markdown backstory
Tan seems to have had a typical career arc — started out coding, built something, had success, and went into management, thus abandoning code. And like many people who leave coding behind for leadership positions, he missed coding:
Foundry
What Tan found 45 days prior to the above tweet was Claude Code. He discovered what many of us have — that agentic coding can be an almost unbelievable experience. He, like many others, found he could do in days what normally would take teams of people months to do.
Tan found, as we all do, that Claude can be a bit unfocused in its work. It will do exactly what it is asked to do and often can’t see the big picture. Tan calls this “mushy mode.” He uses that phrase because Claude can be trained to behave better, and given the right input, can be more focused in specific areas, Tan created gstack to give Claude the capability to play certain roles — product manager, QA, engineering, DevOps, etc.
People seem to be losing their minds over this.
Some folks are calling it, “God mode for development,” but others are saying, “This is just a bunch of prompts.”
Tan posted the repo on Product Hunt, and some folks were less than enthused.
Mo Bitar posted a video calling Tan “delusional” and implying that he’s succumbed to the sycophancy of AI. The comments indicate he is not alone. Bitar points out, too, that it is “just a bunch of text files.”
It is this point that I want to home in on. Yep, it is just “a bunch of text files posted on Github.” (though that is not strictly true — the repo does include code to build binaries to help Claude browse web apps better), but guess what? All the code you carefully craft by hand without the aid of AI is “just a bunch of text files posted on GitHub.” Your Docker files, JSON, and YAML are all “just a bunch of text files.” Huh.
Here is something for folks to consider: Markdown is the new hot coding language. Some folks write Python, some folks write TypeScript, and now, some folks write Markdown. Humans use compilers to convert C++ code into working apps. Now, humans can use Claude to convert Markdown into working apps.
Everything computer science has done over the last hundred years has been to improve our abstraction layers. We used to code by literally flipping mechanical switches. Then we built automatic switches and figured out how to flip them electrically. Then we figured out how to flip them automatically using binary code, and then assembler code, and then higher-level languages.
Markdown is the new hot coding language. Deal with it.
Go to Source
Author:
