Image: Simantic
Why it mattersFirmware engineers waited hours to flash a board and watch what the chip did. Simantic says the agent can run the same test in seconds against a simulated chip.
An AI agent can write firmware in seconds. Testing it still asks the engineer to flash a real board. A Y Combinator Fall 2026 startup called Simantic has built a simulated chip. The agent can test against it on its own. The Launch HN post has 44 points and 12 comments.
The founders are Ahnaf and Seungmin, who posted the launch on Hacker News on 29 October. They say they were firmware engineers at Neuralink and Tesla before Simantic. They worked on the Cybertruck and the Roadster when the cars were early prototypes. The company is on Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch. The product is at simantic.com.
The problem the founders describe
An agent that writes firmware cannot run its own test, Seungmin writes in the Launch HN. The engineer has to flash a devboard and run tests by hand using tools made over a decade ago. That is the loop Simantic shortens. The agent now runs the test against a virtual chip in seconds.
The founders say they first wrapped Renode, a widely used open simulator written in C#. They dropped that path and built their own engine in Rust from scratch. Three reasons they give. Renode's own release speed was too slow for them to merge fixes. The C# runtime was slower than they wanted. And some of their users said the simulation was not accurate enough for timing-sensitive work.
What ships today
Three products. Virtual devboards reachable from a single API call. A script or an agent can program a chip and read what came back. An AI code reviewer that reads a pull request and flags firmware bugs. The simulator is its proof source. And a hardware CI service that runs the firmware against a simulated chip on every commit.
The simulator covers a short list of real chips: STM32F042, F048, F072, F401 and F446, Espressif's ESP32-C3, and the Raspberry Pi RP2040. The founders say they add more each week. The cloud simulator is open to anyone. A local binary comes with a paid developer licence.
How honest the simulator is
The hardest question for a simulator is whether it matches the real chip. Ahnaf answers it twice in the thread. The company runs its own validation rigs. The rigs are devboards wired to a Saleae Logic MSO and a programming bus. A Linux PC drives Claude 24/7 to find gaps between the simulator and the real chip. In a reply, Ahnaf writes "The board is king". He says the team marks any difference between the two. The silicon validation benchmarks are not public yet. The founders say they will publish them in the coming months.
Simantic says it helped an early-stage satellite company test firmware on hardware they did not have yet. The founders say a development module for that satellite costs over $100,000. The simulator did the job at roughly one hundredth of the cost and time. The figure is the company's own.
Source
Launch HN: Simantic (YC F26) – Firmware Simulation for AI Agents, on Hacker News.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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