I got into YC Startup School by hacking it

Against better judgement, I ran it on my repo. Poking at the "Ask anything about the report" bot, it penalizes me heavily for not having "positive tracked outcomes", as I don't report back to Claude what the outcome is. It wanted me to do this:

"At the end of research-heavy sessions, add a tiny closure note:

Decision: Use CacheMountStore with registry/local/GHA backends.

Why: GHA cannot expose the same content.Ingester path, local import has discovery issues, registry can resolve by tag.

Proof / current artifact: See files X, Y, Z. Subagent found A, B, C.

Next action: Implement interface in package N. Do not add new cache-mount flags yet. Use mode=cache-mount on existing cache flags."

There's no need for this, Claude is not my task tracker.

It also penalized me for:

    - Using Claude to introspect a codebase as throwaway work and ` not close with a crisp “acceptable / risky / copy this / avoid this” decision this session.`. No action was needed, it wasn't an actionable session!

    - Using Fable for code review. `Several BuildKit subagent sessions produced research reports, but the transcript does not show whether those findings became implementation choices.` Yes, Fable launches subagents to code review. Valid findings get turned into fixes or WONTFIX.

    - `The Cloudflare CI upload failure got narrowed well, especially after you supplied the exact timestamp and challenged the /v2 routing recommendation, but the session ended without a chosen next diagnostic owner or action this session.` There's no need to pick a next diagnostic owner when I'm a solo founder with no employees.

> Based on Paxel’s own site, 1.2 million+ coders have so far uploaded their reports to YC.

I checked the Paxel website and it says this:

> So far, 1,543,553 sessions have been uploaded and analyzed.

The count is for sessions, not coders. I assume the tool uploads a lot of sessions from each person who uses it.

That’s a large number, but it’s not a million different people. I am surprised that so many people think it’s a good idea to download a run a program which gathers up their coding sessions and submits information about them.

Why does the author keep mentioning that a one line bash command that downloads a bunch of crap is “great UX”?

I could be mistaken, but isn't Paxel a tool that YC *itself* built to understand how founders/applicants apply AI? If so, this feels less scary than some of the comments (i.e. not 3rd party).

Also, not trying to take shots, but should the title be "I got into YC Startup School by hacking it" instead? Isn't that different than the main YC program?

All in all, you did them a solid by finding and responsibly disclosing. Nice job.

For the longest time, the YC application included the question "What was your greatest (non-computer) hack?". They have always liked people who think of ways to work around existing systems. So it's no surprise that their response was positive. Also, all the principals are ex-founders, mostly engineers, who totally understand hacking culture.

Sadly, it looks like they took that question off the application though.

So let me get this straight... technical founders are providing limitless access to their IP, and this is supposed to be a positive indicator that they would be a good founder? Thats wild

Am I misreading this, or is ycombinator running a tool that transfers IP from an applicant’s machine to OpenAI and then transfers the generated summaries into their own servers. And that tool has some “webapp security 101” level vulnerability in it.

Feels like a disaster waiting to happen.

> I uncovered Y Combinator was scoring 100k+ founders around the world through Paxel

Alright, my ears are wide open. Tell us more, how did YC use the private submission data from thousands of founders to score them? They fed some 3rd-Party AI all personal data to score who should get an interview? I can't be the only one here seeing a bad news story unfolding in real time...

So if you built something without the use of an LLM, you’re automatically disqualified now? What a world.

> YC wanted me to use something called Paxel on my computer as part of the application.

> I should run a script, a very easy-to-use cURL one-liner that installed something on my computer and analyzed every line of code I’ve written with a coding agent, compile a report, and upload it to YC’s servers.

Yikes! I hope this is NOT the future of hiring.

Don't read this horror story before bed time if you care about information security.

Perhaps running the script outside a heavily sandboxed system should trigger an automatic rejection.

surprised running paxel doesn't disqualify you, the program sounds sus

> I found that this year, YC wanted me to use something called Paxel on my computer as part of the application.

> I should run a script, a very easy-to-use cURL one-liner that installed something on my computer and analyzed every line of code I’ve written with a coding agent, compile a report, and upload it to YC’s servers.

This is ridiculous. Any kind of application (job, startup school, whatever) should not do this. Honestly, wtf is YC thinking with this?

This is how you end up with gstack. When you believe too hard in secret metrics because when people know about metrics it stops working you inflict psychosis chasing correlations that don't mean anything.

Oh, I remember that thing, it wanted to see my prompt and my code in exchange for telling me my horoscope.

Some hands you have to fold, and I'm folding this one. Patiently waiting for the "let's give all our data to a single AI user" bubble to bust with some massive exploits.

“Got into YC” is being used a bit loosely here. They got invited to startup school, which is a two-day event hosted by YC.

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paxel and how it works sounds so dumb.

so i’m not at all surprised at how it is used and by whom.