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Open-sourced at 10 percent strength
Recording Office Hours
YC started recording all of its office hours, and after a few months Garry Tan had enough data to see clear patterns. The partners kept using the same rhetorical devices to draw out a step-function jump in a founder's ambition.
He gathered them into a markdown file that works as the perfect script for advising founders to raise their ambition. Then he asked Claude to reduce the strength and intensity of the prompt by 90 percent, and he open-sourced that version.
What Stays at YC
The full-strength version stays at YC, because some of it is what you come to YC to get at 100 percent. The crown jewels are not free, and the open-source version is just a taste.
The project also invites people to apply to YC, but only if they are top 10 percent users of Claude Code, judged by whether they think about users and are thoughtful about their product and design.
Why open-source only part of a product?
The open-core model releases a basic version freely and keeps advanced features paid or private. GitLab and Elastic have both used versions of it. The free version spreads use and builds trust, while the retained parts fund the business. Red Hat took a related route by giving away software and charging for support.
How does a prompt file steer an AI?
A prompt file is text placed at the start of the model's input, so its instructions shape every response that follows. Because the model reads it fresh on each run, changing a few lines changes the behavior. Developers often store such files in version control alongside their code. Anthropic's Claude Code, released in February 2025 as a research preview, can read a project's instructions from a markdown file named CLAUDE.md.
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