Antonio V. Stef

Founding Engineer at tryscope.app (YC P26) · Founders, Inc alum

Former electronics engineering student. Previously: Embedder; Voice AI for Real Estate agents; AgTech hardware startup that reached $500k+ pipeline in under 9 months.

My first company was in AgTech, where I was building hardware devices and training neural network models paired with RL models to automate the irrigation and fertilization processes of premium crop farmers, then I went from AgTech to Voice AI, then to infra for agents, then to memory for agents, then to RL infra.

Currently: Founding Engineer at tryscope.app. Open the folders on the left to explore my Work and Writing. To get in touch, connect on LinkedIn or message me on X.

Embedder YC S25

Software Engineer.

Grov

Shared, persistent memory layer for AI coding agents. When one developer's agent learns, the whole team remembers.

Casius

Voice AI for real estate agents.

SSA AgTech

Developed training methodology and trained species-aware NN. Co-designed NN + RL architecture for automated fertilization and irrigation. Co-designed compact solar-powered hardware.

Dimini

AI therapy assistant with semantic mapping.

Agent Experience Is the New UX

Humans are no longer the only ones moving through the funnel. Our opinion still matters, obviously, but agents are starting to sit between the question and the decision.

And I think this is a big shift.

Agents don't have feelings. You don't need to cater to every one of their personalities. None of that matters in the same way anymore.

What matters is:
Does the agent even know your company exists?
Is your product the right product for the task the agent has?
Can the agent understand your docs?
Can it use your product without friction?
Can it explain to the human why your product is the right choice?

They don't care about your company's story, the founders' backgrounds, or any of these things in the way humans do.

It is becoming mandatory to start optimizing for the experience of agents. It's something that a lot of companies will have to think about very soon, if they haven't already.

Agents are already eating up a huge part of the developer tools world on the internet, and soon they will capture parts of almost every industry that exists online.

With this being said, take a moment to think about how many times per day you ask your agent what to use and why. How many times do you make it do a web search?

And, probably the most important part, how many times has it made you change your initial way of wanting to implement something?

Now think about how many developers are already using Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and other coding agents every day.

That number should make a lot of companies uncomfortable.

Act Today

I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking of the future, envisioning the life I desire. But I've realized: the present is far more important than what was or will be. No human can alter time, so learn from the past, and let your decisions from TODAY shape the future.

Your relationships, health, and career will be far more affected by decisions you take today than by anything in the past. Don't act in regard to the past or future. Act in regard to today, in calibration to the future you're designing and patterns you've learned. Otherwise, you're just “being busy,” not “building.”

Divine Burnout

To burn out trying to become something greater is divine. To fade safely as someone you never were is a tragedy.

The Founder's Loop

The emotional waveform every real founder rides:

I'm going to change the world → I can't even get out of bed → Everyone else is ahead of me → I'm a fraud → Wait… what if this works? → Back to #1

That loop never ends. You just get better at surfing it. Feeling lost and questioning yourself isn't a bug. It's the cost of playing the founder game. Anyone who doesn't feel insane a few times a week is playing too small.

Hold Them Accountable

You will lose old friends, not because you're too busy, but because they no longer understand the game you're playing.

Hold your friends accountable. Don't let their potential die inside them. Remember, the wheel is round.

Obsession and Sacrifice

Founding a startup is the combination of obsession and sacrifice. You work 7 days a week, fueled only by vision and faith.

I recently read that a bored mind is like an opened door for the devil, and I couldn't agree more. What I've come to realize is that I'm happier the more I work. Humans need challenge. We were built to think, build, solve.

If you have a dream but you're not willing to work on it or fix your systems, you're just disappointing yourself daily. A focused life is not a better life, but the only life one with big aspirations should live.

If you've worked 10-hour days and felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment at the end, you're doing it right. Keep building.

Stay Foolish

Experience is often just a collection of reasons why something won't work.

The world belongs to those who don't know their limits. Once you learn “how things are done,” you stop inventing how they could be done. Stay foolish. It pays better.

Books

Favorites

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• Psycho-Cybernetics
• Deep Work

Read

• C++ Primer (5th Edition)
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• The Molecule of More
• The Courage to Be Disliked
• Ideaflow
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things
• Outliers
• Atomic Habits
• Lean Startup
• Meditations
• Zero to One
• The Diary of a CEO
• Psycho-Cybernetics
• QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
• 1984
• Blitzscaling
• Ego is the Enemy
• Deep Work

…probably forgetting some.