Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Garry Tan: Breaking knowledge work into micro-steps prevents LLM hallucination and failure

Garry Tan · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · Apr 29, 2025 · at 1:47:44

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan describes how Casetext and other YC startups build reliable vertical AI applications.

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“Garry Tan: It's like, what is a specific thing that a human does? Break it down into the very specific steps that a real human would do, and then actually, basically, if it breaks, you're just asking in that step to do too many things, so like, break it down into even smaller steps, and somehow that worked, and like, basically, this is the blueprint that I think a lot of YCE companies and AI vertical SaaS startups are doing across the whole industry right now.”

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Assertion Supported
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Assertion Not checkable as stated
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