A practical guide to gstack, the open-source Claude Code skill pack from Garry Tan (President and CEO of Y Combinator). Not a marketing pitch. The actual install, the actual commands, what each skill does, where it shines, and where it doesn't. If you want a 5-person product team in your terminal for free, this is the install path.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Solo builders and small teams hit a ceiling. You can write the code, but you can't also be the staff engineer reviewing your own PR. You can't be the designer who challenges your wireframes. You can't be the QA that catches the real-browser regression. So you either hire (slow, expensive, often wrong people) or you ship slower than you should.
AI agents fix some of this, but most builders roll their own workflows from scratch. Bespoke prompts. One-off scripts. Whatever sticks. The result is inconsistent quality and a lot of repeated work.
gstack ships the workflows. 23 specialized skills, organized into 8 stages of the product lifecycle, each tested in production by Garry Tan across 40+ public and private repos. You install it once. The agent runs the team for you.
Why This Changes Everything
- One install, full team. 23 specialized AI roles in one repo. The eng review, the design review, the staff engineer audit, the release engineer, the QA in a real browser. All shipped, all free.
- Verified by usage. Tan didn't write gstack as a demo. He uses it across 40+ public and private repos, and his 2026 contribution rate is over 1,200 commits year to date.
- Open standard. gstack follows the Agent Skills format, so the skills work in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw, and other AI coding tools.
- Free, MIT, no paywall. No premium tier, no per-skill cost, no upsell. The full pack is on GitHub.
Step 1: Install gstack
Three things on your machine first:
- Bun v1.0+ (the JavaScript runtime gstack runs on)
- Node.js
- Git
- Claude Code (the agent gstack plugs into)
If you have those, install gstack:
git clone https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git
cd gstack
./setupThe setup script registers all 23 skills with your Claude Code install. 30 seconds, give or take. Once registered, type /in any Claude Code session and you'll see the gstack commands listed.