Jared Friedman
@snowmaker
founder, techno-optimist, college dropout, partner at @ycombinator.
850 Following 64K Followers
When I was building YC's conversational AI, I benchmarked every LLM and inference cloud I could get my hands on. In my head-to-head benchmark, the top performer was GLM-5.2 on Wafer.
Agentmuxer - it's like OpenRouter, but for tools.
Your avg sf night, 1 am office hours with AI YC partner after you ship a new feature trying to get feedback
The corgi jet at the end is the best part.
🚨 THE SLOPCANNON PRESENTS 🚨
🔥🐶 CORGI CAFE - THE MOVIE 🐶🔥
it's true. one of the most enjoyable things I've been doing the last 6 months is getting scaling YC companies shit tons of compute
congrats to @PhilipJohnston and the @Starcloud_ team on the massive $250M round, and $2.3B valuation!
was lucky to catch up with Philip at YC Startup School a few weeks ago, where we chatted about how to build and raise money for ambitious ideas (spoiler alert: book a launch to space)
Philip really sets the bar on ambition and resourcefulness. goes to show that you really can just make things happen.
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Caught up backstage w ClawFather @steipete; this is a packed one:
* Loops, Graphs, and Florps — what's latest in agentic engineering?
* Outie vs. Innie — avoid his personal vs. work agent fighting?
* Startup ideas in 2026 — what to build?
Lots of incredible zingers in here:
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This partnership with @OpenAI is long overdue.
Before Replit was in YC, PG asked Sam to recruit us.
Here’s Sam telling the story of how we first met:
Technical debt used to be something you just had to live with in a sufficiently large codebase. No longer.
Super excited for Grip Robotics to come out of stealth.
This is two robotics engineers, @Jonnygrutt and @stachq1, from ETH Zürich that developed a custom 3-way gripper; multi-arm collaboration; and software that lets their robots work on moving conveyor belts autonomously 24/7.
They start with decontamination of organic waste 🌱 a huge and growing problem. It turns out, clean organics is surprisingly valuable. Ultimately, they're building the next big robotics company.
Check out the video (actions shown @ 1x speed!):
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Interesting theory.
What if:
- Opus 4.6 was the last Opus generation that got a lot of use by Anthropic's own employees
- After that they primarily used Mythos internally
- 4.7, 4.8 and 5 were RLAIFd by Mythos "teachers"
- Hence why 4.6 is the last Opus gen who doesn't report back like a robot wanting to cover every potential hole another AI system would've spotted and criticized
- Hence why coding style in Opus 5 also gets criticized, not only behavior in CC
I have no idea if this is true, but it's plausible enough to throw it into the ring. Do your worst, I guess.
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YC built software that all our founders have used to send SAFEs for the last few years. Today, we're opening it up to everyone and giving it away for free.
Take a minute to watch this video; it's a cool one. This is not some AI generated video; this is the actual robot the Grip founders built, sorting real trash, at 1x speed.
Hosted the first YC Intern Expo today with 1,400 college students & 52 YC companies hiring interns.
Many of YC's best founders started as interns. From the people I met, pretty sure we'll get more from this crowd.
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@zanehengsperger "pain is the moat" is good startup advice in general
Some people are asking what these 4M lines of code are doing.
It's not gstack; I actually left off gstack in my LOC count since it's technically a Garry Tan project, not a YC one! The LOC count would be much higher if you included gstack and gbrain.
The vast majority of the codebase is internal tools for YC founders and for us to run YC. If you're not a YC founder, you won't have seen these, but we have built a ton of software for YC founders.
A small amount of it is public facing, like our jobs website Over the next year we're going to make a lot more of it public-facing and it'll be more clear why we're building all this.
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YC bookface hiring, mainly sourcing, is the best external software in my entire stack
a unique investor “value-add” … just build software for founders 🫡
The size of YC's codebase, over the last 14 years.
This might be my favorite fundraising announcement video ever.
