Summary
Y Combinator’s podcast sits down with Jay V, founder and CEO of Open Code, the open-source alternative to Claude Code that lets developers use any underlying model. The conversation opens with a striking set of numbers: as of June 2026, Open Code has reached 13 million monthly active users (20x growth since January), processes roughly 7 trillion tokens per day — exceeding Open Router’s entire network — and is tracking toward $38–40 million in annualized inference revenue, with an additional $18 million ARR from 160,000 monthly subscribers.
A centerpiece of the interview is the Anthropic incident: early January 2026, Anthropic attempted to block Claude Code subscription access for Open Code users by rejecting requests whose system prompts contained the phrase “open code.” Jay describes the move as inadvertently equating the two products in the public eye, driving a wave of new users who had never heard of Open Code before. The fallout and the subsequent OpenAI endorsement — allowing Codex subscribers to use Open Code as their harness — are framed as twin catalysts for the platform’s explosive growth.
The interview also covers Open Code’s global user base (Brazil at 5%, Indonesia at 4% of traffic), the emerging enterprise motion where companies discover employees already using the product before formal procurement begins, and the platform’s expansion from developer tooling into non-technical use cases and product-embedded coding agents.
📺 Source: Y Combinator · Published July 24, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
