Garry Tan: 95% of YC W25 code is LLM-generated — vibe coding skeptics are 'coping'

Summary

Garry Tan: 95% of YC W25 code is LLM-generated

For roughly 25% of the Winter 2025 Y Combinator batch, 95% of lines of code are LLM-generated. That figure comes directly from YC president Garry Tan, and it is the clearest data point yet on how fast vibe coding has moved from novelty to default. Skeptics, Tan argues, are coping.

Discord IPO

Discord is in early talks with bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as 2025, first reported by the New York Times. The company is profitable, which raises the question of why it needs to go public at all — the honest answer is exit liquidity for employees and early investors after more than a decade of building.

Founder Jason Citron sold his earlier mobile gaming company OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million in 2011, then built Discord out of a chat tool he made for his game studio Hammer and Chisel. The company raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation in December 2018, led by Greenoaks with participation from FirstMark, Tencent, IVP, and Index, and was last valued at $15 billion in 2021.

The Mid Journey Discord server hit 15 million members in 2023, underscoring how Discord cracked large-scale interest communities in a way Slack never could. The crypto wave drove similar growth. One underrated advantage during Mid Journey's early run: by distributing through Discord, the product had instant mobile support on every platform Discord ran on, without building a single native app.

The valuation question is genuinely hard. Reddit peaked at a $40 billion market cap despite losing $500 million on $1.3 billion in revenue in the last year. If Discord can demonstrate clean profitability, it could price above its last private mark.

Alexa Plus

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced Alexa Plus in New York — a generative AI-powered upgrade priced at $20 a month, or free for Prime members ($15/month). The Verge's hands-on confirmed the product exists and works: a single session had it dim lights, adjust a thermostat, and start a Roomba without repeating the wake word.

The skepticism is structural. Every AI assistant launch for the past decade has demoed the same examples — book a flight, order groceries, make a restaurant reservation — and none has achieved mainstream traction with those use cases. Ben Thompson's read is that Amazon and Apple don't need to overreach: both have decade-plus head starts in device and service integrations, and simply being a better voice assistant within their existing ecosystems is already a heavy lift.

On Siri, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple's long-promised AI overhaul is hitting engineering problems and software bugs, with some features pushed to May or later.

The name Alexa has paid a measurable cultural price: it ranked as the 32nd most popular girl's name in the US in 2015, fell to 536th by 2022, and dropped further into the 600s by 2023 — the lowest since 1985.