YC partners say one word gives away an AI-written application
Applications to Y Combinator have grown 60% longer in three years, and the word "wedge" now appears in more than a fifth of them. Two partners have said publicly what that tells them.
Y Combinator asks founders three plain things: how they picked the idea, who else is in the space, and how they plan to make money.
Partners at the accelerator say the answers have started to sound the same.
Tyler Bosmeny, a YC partner, wrote on X that applications have grown 60% longer over the past three years. His comment on the figure was "I wonder what could explain that…"
Pete Koomen, another partner, spent a week reading applications and posted his own count. On his data, the share containing the word "wedge" went from under 1% in spring 2025 to more than 20% in summer 2026.
Koomen also tracked em dashes. He said their use began growing in 2023 and "really hit their stride in 24", and that by summer 2025 more than half of applications contained one.
He argued the spacing mattered. Em dashes with spaces around them spiked in summer 2025, at the same time "wedge" took off, and he linked the timing to the release of Anthropic's Opus 4 model. That correlation is his reading, not a demonstrated cause.
One tell has faded. Koomen found "delve" peaked in 1.25% of applications in winter 2024, then dropped away.
The reason is probably that YC's co-founder said so out loud. In April 2024 Paul Graham posted about a cold email pitching "a novel project" that used the word, and said the point was not that he disliked it but that it flagged text written by ChatGPT. The post has been viewed 2.6 million times.
Graham's objection was about speech, not style. "No one uses it in spoken English," he wrote, putting it alongside "burgeoning" as a word people reach for when they want to sound clever on the page.
He returned to the theme in May, saying that "a lot" of founder emails now arrive in what he called a hard-hitting journalistic style. "I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before."
The practical lesson for anyone filling in an application form is not that AI is banned. It is that the readers have started counting, and they publish what they find.
So the tests are simple. Would you say the sentence out loud to someone in a room? Does the answer contain a number, a customer name or a date that only you could know? Is it shorter than the version you started with?
A longer answer is not a better one. On Bosmeny's figure, length is now the first thing that marks an application out, and it marks it out in the wrong direction.
Y Combinator has backed more than 5,000 startups since 2005, among them Reddit, DoorDash and Airbnb. The people reading your form have read a great many forms. Sounding like the others is the risk, not sounding unpolished.