Garry Tan, one of America’s biggest venture capitalists has warned startup founders against celebrating extreme work habits. “This is unhealthy by the way (speaking from experience). Try to get at least 6 hours of sleep per night when deeply addicted to Claude Code,” Tan wrote in an X post, responding to a tech founder who publicly boasted that his chief technology officer had not slept for more than a day while building new AI features. Claude Code is Anthropic’s 2025-launched AI tool which is designed to help developers write, understand, and modify software faster. It works like an AI coding partner that can accelerate prototyping by 10x via collaborative AI agents, as shown in recent benchmarks compiling a full C compiler in weeks.The conversation started when Alistair McLeay, co-founder and co-CEO of AI startup Grw AI recently shared a post where he wrote: “Our CTO hasn’t slept in 36 hours because he’s been obsessively and single-handedly building massive new features with Claude Code’s Agent Teams.”“I genuinely think this might be the biggest paradigm shift in how fast you can build since Claude Code first came out last year,” he added.
Growing concern over burnout in AI startups
The exchange highlights a wider debate in the AI industry, where new tools are speeding up development but also encouraging round-the-clock work. While founders often share stories of extreme effort to signal progress, investors and operators are increasingly speaking about burnout, health risks, and long-term sustainability.Replying to the post, one user said “the 3am ‘just one more prompt’ loop is real. worst part is the agent keeps shipping while you’re falling asleep at the keyboard. at least with manual coding you’d naturally stop when you got tired”. “I’ve been thinking about what makes these tools so addictive. I think the answer is variable ratio reinforcement reward. You’re always at the 90% mark of building something truly incredible and you have no idea how long it’ll take for the last 10% to wrap up,” said another user.“Been there. The trap is the dopamine loop of “one more run” in the terminal, so you never actually close the day. 6 hours + a hard stop is the difference between shipping tomorrow and debugging ghosts tonight,” replied a third.
