Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has defended the use of AI in writing.
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If it talks like AI, and it walks like AI, it might just be AI.An application to the startup accelerator Y Combinator includes several written prompts. Founders need to explain how they picked the idea, who their competitors are, and how they'll make money. Many techies have offloaded their writing skills to AI — and application data suggests it shows in their applications.YC applications have grown by 60% in length over the past three years, according to partner Tyler Bosmeny. "I wonder what could explain that..." he wrote on X.Pete Koomen, another YC partner, wrote on X that he noticed a difference. He thought: "Back in my day (one year ago) founders didn't talk like this."The word "wedge" began to rise in prevalence in 2025, according to a graph Koomen shared. By the summer 2026 batch, the word was in about 20% of applications.Em dashes took off a bit earlier, starting in 2023 and accelerating in 2024. By the summer 2025 batch, em dashes were used in over 50% of YC applications, according to the data.Koomen pointed out that the spacing of the em dashes mattered. The use of em dashes with spaces around them (so spaced — exactly — like this) spiked in summer 2025. That's also when "wedge" spiked, Koomen said, and coincides with the launch of Anthropic's Opus 4.
