Proving grounds for agents and engineers
Headstarter builds applied AI products that put agents and engineers to work on real problems, and judges them on what they actually ship.
It started as the #1 community for software engineers. Members have gotten into YC, raised $4.5M directly, and sold their companies to YC startups.
Applied AI, built to ship
Put agents and engineers on real work, and judge them by evidence.
- Starker
RL environments for cyber agents
Realistic company networks for training and evaluating offensive-security agents, scored by what the services recorded rather than what the model claims.
- Lodestar
Abliterate, steer, inspect open models
A Mac app for mechanistic interpretability: run any open model offline, see which neurons fire, and steer or edit it.
The agentic engineering platform
Work across repositories, talk to your code by voice, and let agents plan, edit, test and open pull requests. Every session is traced and scored.
- Talent
Startup recruiting, run by agents
Agents search engineers' real work, research the backchannel and score every candidate against the role, so founders get a ranked shortlist each week.
Succeed in the Age of AI
These are the traits we believe are essential to thrive in today's rapidly evolving world.
- 01
Move to San Francisco
Be where the action is. Proximity to the best founders, engineers, and investors accelerates your growth exponentially.
- 02
Take a Gap Year in School
The traditional path isn't the only path. Real-world experience and building projects can outpace years of classroom learning.
- 03
Be an Independent Thinker
Question conventional wisdom. The best opportunities come from seeing what others miss and having the courage to act on it.