it took 1 application for us to get into yc

People writing code documentation software should not be comparing themselves to professional athletes

can someone tell my why codex just tried to use the dd cli to wipe my hard drive

i, as han's cofounder, am in alignment. however, i think a lot of people are misinterpreting our culture. some other thoughts i have to paint the picture: 1. culture isn't b&w between "having fun" and "working hard/intensely" 2. it's important to endure and have grit and it's important that we're transparent with people on what they're signing up for - the expectation is that the work is challenging. 3. simultaneously as cofounders, it's our job as leaders to inspire and get people to be passionate about the work and mission. we enjoy the work & we need to bring people along on it.

In my company, I am allowing candidates to use any ai agent they want to code a simple dsa problem. And out of 8 or 10 interviews i took, only 1 passed. So, even with AI, candidates are unable to clear rounds. Main gap i found is no knowledge on fundamentals. AI can code but candidates are understanding neither the problem nor the solution.

Thanks Markdown 🚌

co-founded a company with this man and when we got acquired my first thought was "good, i don't have to stop working with him." anyway, hiring

New mac. Which virus should I install first?

I realized that goal setting is the core RL loop of a startup. Set a two-week goal Hit the goal? → Reward signal. Reinforce what worked. Missed it? → Negative reward. Diagnose root cause, update strategy, try again.

Landed 2 new customers in the most YC way possible Yesterday a YC alum DM’d me asking how to solve a few problems that were going to cost him $200K/year with another provider (in a semi related space) I had YC kickoff all day, so we met at 10PM at Hogpatch (YC coworking space) By midnight, he became a customer because he needed Context’s infra to build his own solution and save a ridiculous amount of money Then I kept working till 2AM and saw a group of guys in my batch nearby brainstorming growth ideas They asked for my opinion, so I shared a few things I’ve done that worked One of the ideas involved a ton of web extraction The next day, they subscribed too Turns out being a semi-decent person pays

It’s hard to imagine why cloning a git repo should be much slower than downloading an equivalent-sized file Where are the experiments with custom git clients that clone faster

AI as we know it might not exist if @nvidia had not gone all-in more than a decade ago. CUDA was foundational to the development of AI and remains important for training. Inference, however, is different. CUDA has no role in inference. AI is now useful. For coding. For doing your taxes. For finance, legal and HR departments. People are coding their own apps, eliminating SaaS applications. And none of them know anything about CUDA. And of course it’s this way. It always is. When a new technology emerges the practitioners use low level software. It looks like math. Its written by the select few. Graduate students. Supercompute engineers. But to get popular, the technology needs to leave this environment. There simply aren’t enough technologists to make a market. There are no low level programming languages that are popular. They are just too hard. In order to get popular, computer languages move from low level to high level. Compare how many people write Assembly versus Python. It’s: 1 vs. 10,000. When a technology is used by those who know nothing about its creation, and instead care only about its usefulness, then it has broken through. It takes 12 keystrokes to link a world class AI model to your application, and start getting blazing fast tokens. You don’t need to know anything about AI. There is no CUDA. Just point to the OpenAI API. Or the Cerebras API. Or to Fireworks. Or to DataBricks. Here is what you type to move from Nvidia GPUs to Cerebras. API key= os.environ.get(“CEREBRAS_API_KEY”) That’s it.

39 startups are building alongside Vercel for six weeks. Backed by $8M in credits from AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and more, they have the resources to scale their infrastructure. Meet the 2026 Vercel AI Accelerator cohort. vercel.com/blog/2026-vercel-…

software generation is no longer the bottleneck. it's operations trillion dollar opportunity for whoever solves it

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.

we are doubling deployed helix db instances daily

Hi friends! Big news today: Helicone is joining Mintlify 🚀 3 years ago, we started Helicone out of YC W23 with a simple bet: every hype-cycle has a massive observability market, and we felt like AI was going to be even more prevalent. We knew someone needed to build the platform to ingest and make sense of it all. So we did. Years of grinding and a handful of pivots later, we built something real that customers use every single day. I spent most of that time worried about tomorrow and never really stopped to look back. But looking back now: - 14T+ tokens processed - 30k+ sign ups - 36M+ users tracked - Trending on Github last year (5.2k stars) - $1M+ ARR - Product of the week on Product Hunt That still blows my mind. So why Mintlify? In a post-AGI world, a knowledge infrastructure layer is the thing that makes the most sense for companies to invest in. Waymo didn't reinvent the roads, but still needed to learn about them. Mintlify is the information layer for agents building the systems of the future. The overlap with what we were building at Helicone was obvious. Same world, different angle. More importantly, I actually like the team and the product. That sounds simple but after talking to a dozen companies, it's rarer than you'd think. @handotdev and @hahnbeelee are both incredible and formidable founders that Cole and I really admire. Things I learned building Helicone that I think are underrated - A 5-person team can do an absurd amount if everyone is locked in. Headcount is not a moat. - If you have data at scale and need analytics, just pick ClickHouse. Don't overthink it. - The grind is real, and it's fun. But REALLY try not to be stressed when you aren't grinding. That part took me way too long to learn. - It's never too late to pivot and try new things. - Charge more for your product. What's next I'm going to be leading an engineering team at Mintlify and I'm genuinely excited about what we're building. Keep an eye on my X, because I can't wait to be tweeting about it more. Thanks to @coleywoleyyy for being an incredible co-founder. Thanks to our team, our investors, our customers, and everyone who bet on us early. And thanks to my fiancee for putting up with the chaos of startup life. That part is deeply underappreciated. And lastly, thank you @mintlify for taking a bet on the Helicone team. We are so excited for the next phase. More to come. DMs are open.