Y Combinator Startup Podcast

As no-code design tools become more common, so do the pitfalls. You know what they look like - the purple gradients, annoying hover effects, sections that fade as you scroll. So how do you avoid a site that feels vibe coded while still taking advantage of these new tools? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein is joined by Visiting Partner Raphael Schaad, the founder and designer of Cron (now Notion Calendar). Together they’ll review user submitted sites with an eye for how to leverage these tools and avoid the common vibe coding mistakes.

Poetiq is a new startup founded by former DeepMind researchers that recently achieved a major jump on the ARC-AGI and Humanity's Last Exam benchmark by layering a recursive self-improvement system on top of existing models. In this episode of Lightcone, Poetiq's Founder & CEO Ian Fischer joined us to discuss how small teams can build “reasoning harnesses” that outperform base models, what that means for startups and why automating prompt engineering may be one of the most powerful levers in AI today.Chapters:00:00 – Intro00:40 – What Is Poetiq?01:07 – Recursive Self-Improvement Explained02:07 – The Fine-Tuning Trap02:59 – “Stilts” for LLMs03:14 – Recursive Self-Improvement vs. Fine-Tuning05:05 – Taking the Top Spot on ARC-AGI06:37 – Beating Claude on Humanity’s Last Exam08:40 – How the Meta-System Works10:26 – Beyond RL: A New S-Curve11:32 – Automating Prompt Engineering13:37 – From 5% to 95% Performance14:50 – Early Access & Putting Your Agent on Stilts16:17 – From YC Founder to DeepMind Researcher18:29 – Advice for Engineers in the AI EraApply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/applyWork at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

With the takeoff of OpenClaw and MoltBook, a new agent-driven economy is taking shape.

In this episode of the Lightcone, we took a look at the explosive growth of AI dev tools and whether the time has come for builders to make something agents want.

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.

In the AI era, startups aren't winning by hiring faster — they're winning by automating as many internal functions as possible. In this episode of Main Function, Garry breaks down how tiny teams are beating companies 20x their size by building automations into every workflow, from engineering to ops to customer support.