The Sycophancy Trap — AI flattering a tech executive while engineers struggle

The Sycophancy Trap: How AI Is Fueling a War Between Managers and Engineers in Silicon Valley

When your AI assistant tells you you’re a genius, you might want to worry. There’s a video making the rounds on X right now. In it, @atmoio tears apart how AI chatbots — Claude in particular — are turning tech CEOs into delusional yes-men magnets. The target? Gary Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, who recently published gstack on GitHub: a collection of markdown files with Claude Code prompts that role-play an entire engineering team. CEO, Engineering Manager, QA, DevOps — all played by one LLM. ...

March 23, 2026 · 9 min · Krzysztof Sajna