Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has, in the past, jokingly admitted that he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps because he’s so excited to be working with his AI agents. On a new episode of Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, set to publish on Tuesday, Tan put a price tag on his passion.

“I spend about maybe $100[,000]-$200,000 a year on tokens,” he told Isaacson. He uses agents for countless work projects and coding tasks and has freely shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on Github — an effort to help teach others what agents can do, he said.

On the one hand, he uses his agent the way many people use AI: to help him research Isaacson’s podcast and prep for the kinds of questions he might be asked. On the other, his agent also helps him run his life.

“It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years,” he said.

He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life, and for it to do it somewhat more autonomously. Think of it as a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder at all times. Like, almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or, it’ll help you see around corners.”

As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,” he said.

For instance, Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC,” he said. “We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. Like it actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”

Tan who is, naturally, an avid lover of technology (as anyone running Silicon Valley’s famed startup accelerator would be), believes personal AI agents will eventually become mainstream, if one major problem is solved: Costs have got to come down.

“It’s too expensive right now,” he said, adding that he knows the amount of money he spends on AI agents is “a crazy privilege that not everyone can do.”

But freebie agents controlled by big tech maybe aren’t the answer, either. When discussing the future he’d like tech to build, and how Meta as a social media company has impacted us, he said, “This is a huge company that controls the algorithm, and we all wish that they didn’t at some level,” he said. “So you could imagine a personal AI that you control, that you program.”

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