“Chad: the Brainrot IDE” is a new product backed by Y Combinator, and it’s so wild, people thought it was fake

When former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, an audience member asked him if the HBO satire show was a success Silicon Valley It will be revived. Costolo, who was a writer for the series, answered no (at timestamp 38:17).

He said that while writers talk about it regularly, they don’t follow up on it because the actual Silicon Valley of today is too weird to emulate.

The most recent example is a new company called Clad Labs that launched from Y Combinator this week. Clad’s product is so outside the box that people thought it was an April Fool’s joke back in November.

But it’s a real product, founder Richard Wang told TechCrunch. The product is called “Chad: The Brainrot IDE”. It’s another integrated development environment for programming – an IDE is the one that software developers use for programming – but with a special twist. While waiting for the AI ​​coder to finish its task, the developer can tinker with his favorite mental activities, inside the IDE window.

Or as the company’s website declares: “Gamble while you code. Watch TikToks. Swipe on Tinder. Play mini-games. This is no joke — it’s Chad IDE, and it solves the biggest productivity problem in AI-powered development that no one’s talking about.”

The founders say their IDE increases productivity by helping with “context switching.” Their argument is that by doing the mental activities within the IDE itself, once the AI ​​has finished the task, you will go right back to work instead of focusing on your phone or browser.

Reaction to X was mixed. While some people thought it was fake satire, others thought it was a good or terrible idea.

Like it or not, everyone had an opinion, even Geordie Hayes, co-host of the pro-tech podcast TBPN. Hayes wrote a post about the product called “Rage Catching Losers.” In it, he said of Chad’s IDE: “On the one hand, it’s funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong on the official YC account?”

Products like Chad IDE and Cluely have taken the taste of anger from a marketing gimmick to a “product strategy” and “it really shouldn’t be that way,” he said. He urged YC to start teaching founders that “catching anger is for losers.”

This is particularly interesting advice from someone who, as a founder, has mastered viral marketing without anger. Hayes and his wife, Sarah, founded Party Round, a financing startup that has gone viral for their friendly marketing gimmicks like launching NFT versions of the best “useful” venture capital. (Party Round was rebranded as Capital and sold to Rho in 2024.)

Wang told TechCrunch that what haters don’t understand about his IDE is that it wasn’t meant to be anger bait. The founders hope that it will become a truly beloved AI coding software for consumer app developers. They want to give these people a consumer application-like experience in the IDE.

Although the product is real, it is not yet available to the public.

“We are currently in closed beta,” Wang said. Chad is currently trying to build a “community” of users who like the idea. Clad Labs hopes to open the product to the public soon, but for now, users must get an invite from someone already in beta.

There’s definitely a certain type of developer who loves Chad. But whatever the future holds for this product, one thing is true: Silicon Valley is almost impossible to emulate these days.