Y Combinator CEO says he spends Rs 1.8 crore on AI tokens as AI agents run his life
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan spends up to $200,000 (around Rs 1.8 crore) a year on AI tokens, with artificial intelligence agents now handling several parts of his daily routine. From helping him with coding projects to preparing for important conversations, Tan says he has built an AI setup that knows a great deal about his personal and professional life. The extent of this access is considerable. Tan told author Walter Isaacson on his podcast The Builders that his AI agents have access to his entire email history, Dropbox files and Apple Notes. They have also read his therapy notes going back 20 years. This allows the tools to work with a level of personal context that a regular chatbot may not have.
Tan says they can assist with almost anything he does during the day, offer suggestions and even anticipate what he might need. He compared the experience to having someone constantly by his side who understands his preferences and can step in whenever needed.
"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," he said.
Tan's enthusiasm for these tools has also affected his sleeping habits. He has previously joked about experiencing "cyber psychosis" and barely sleeping because he gets so excited about working with AI agents. His interest in the technology extends to Y Combinator's operations. The startup accelerator has an internal AI agent named Stray Light, which has access to information about the founders it has funded, people who have emailed the organisation and startup applications.
Tan says the agent has its own personality as well as access to the company's information. He has also published 23 Claude Code skills under the name gstack on GitHub, sharing how he uses AI agents for different tasks. Despite spending such a large amount himself, Tan does not believe this level of AI access is affordable for everyone yet. He said the cost of using agents remains too high and will need to fall before personal AI assistants become mainstream. He also believes people should eventually have AI systems they can control and customise, rather than depending on technology companies to manage them.This Gen Z Cisco employee exclusively got unlimited AI tokens for work
The growing use of AI tokens is also becoming visible inside large technology companies. Cisco, for example, has given a 27-year-old employee unlimited AI tokens for a project aimed at rewriting a large part of its legacy code. Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel told Fortune that Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known as Paddy, has been given the freedom to use as many tokens as required for the assignment.
"I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," Patel said. "So I'm like, you can go, you can go nuts."
Paddy joined Cisco in 2025 after the company acquired EzDubs, a real-time translation startup he co-founded in 2023. Patel said he came across the former founder working in a role that did not fully use his abilities. During a conversation, Paddy proposed that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code with a team of just two people. Patel was impressed by the suggestion and gave him four weeks to demonstrate the approach.
The larger target is to refactor 98 per cent of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months. Patel believes giving younger, AI-native employees the freedom to take on ambitious engineering projects can help companies rethink how they work.- EndsAlso Read | Cisco gives Gen Z employee unlimited AI tokens to rewrite all of company's codeAlso Read | Software engineer says working at Zoho was the worst period of his career, made him hate codingAlso Read | Deepinder Goyal says select people should not buy Temple wearable, plans to change return policy
Ankita Garg is a tech journalist with more than 9 years of experience. She is always curious about new gadgets and loves writing about them. When not writing, you will find her painting or sketching.
