I Got Into YC by Hacking Its AI. Meritocracy Is Dead.
YC deployed an AI tool called Paxel to score 100,000+ founders by analyzing their code. One applicant reverse-engineered it, optimized for the scoring logic, and got in. This isn’t a story about a clever hack β it’s about how every evaluation system becomes a game, every game gets hacked, and the arms race between gatekeepers and applicants is quietly destroying the difference between merit and performance.