u/k4narie

I recently launched my startup and got to 100 users within 5 days.

At the end of this month, a startup accelerator will check in on my progress before deciding whether to accept me.

Right now, about 80% of my growth is organic. I’ve only spent around $10 on TikTok ads.

The mistake I made is that I didn’t use a unique tracking link, so I can’t clearly separate paid users from organic ones. But the TikTok campaign showed a cost per landing page view of about $0.08.

My question is:

Should I keep running ads with a bigger budget to grow faster?

Or could that look bad to the accelerator, like I’m “buying” users instead of proving real organic demand?

Hey everyone,

I had a pretty wild emotional rollercoaster with Y Combinator over the last 24 hours and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this, or if anyone knows what might be happening behind the scenes.
I applied late for the Summer 2026 cycle. Yesterday, I received the standard rejection email. It had a bit of a silver lining, mentioning that my application was in the top 10% of the batch and strongly encouraging me to re-apply for future batches. It sucked, but hey, top 10% felt like a decent consolation prize.
But then, a few hours later, I received a follow-up email with the subject line: "Your Y Combinator Application — Correction".

The email explicitly told me to disregard the previous rejection email. It said that because I submitted late, my application is actually still under consideration and they will get back to me with a decision within the next week. They also mentioned there is nothing I need to do on my end, but gave me a link to submit an update if I want to.

Obviously, my hope is back up, but I'm trying to stay grounded. A few questions for the community:

1. What could have happened internally at YC? Did they just mass-send rejections to late applicants by mistake before actually reading them, or did an automated system trigger too early?

2. What are my actual chances now? Does the fact that they explicitly pulled my application back out of the "no" pile mean they are genuinely interested, or is this just a standard administrative fix for all late applicants?

3. What should I do next? They gave me a link to submit an application update. Should I scramble to add any minor traction updates right now to capture their attention, or just leave it alone so I don't mess up whatever momentum I might have?

Would love to hear from any past YC founders or anyone else who got hit with this correction email today. Thanks!

Hi, straight to the point:
I’m building an AI agent that operates in a loop.

Whenever I ask it a question, it adds the following to the context window:
The user’s question
System prompts
Tool descriptions
Previous tool outputs
Other conversation state

The model then repeatedly calls tools until it decides the task is finished.

I’m running into reliability and hallucination issues with two different approaches:

1. Saving the agent’s internal reasoning
The agent generates an internal plan/reasoning step before calling tools, and I save that reasoning into the context for future iterations.
This helps maintain continuity, but tokens accumulate very quickly. After a while, the context becomes bloated and the model starts behaving strangely or hallucinating.

2. Not saving the internal reasoning
The agent still generates an internal plan before using tools, but the reasoning is not preserved. Instead, only a short summary of the action is stored.
This avoids context bloat, but creates another problem: the detailed internal plan is effectively lost after each iteration. As a result, the agent often repeats the same few actions over and over inside the loop, as if it forgets what it already concluded internally.

How should I fix this?