About

Safety-critical embedded systems, built so agents can work on them

I'm Stefano Falasca. I help industrial SMEs and deep-tech hardware startups build robust embedded systems — and I focus on the verification loop that lets AI coding agents build, test, and iterate on those systems without a human watching every cycle.

Who I work with

Two kinds of team keep running into the same wall. The first is industrial manufacturers and automation vendors — small-to-medium suppliers scaling up, often carrying years of legacy code, who need safety-critical software maturity as they take on larger enterprise programs. The second is deep-tech hardware startups building real hardware that needs software robust enough to ship.

Different entry points, one underlying problem: you know the codebase has an architectural or reliability issue, you have the budget to fix it properly, and you'd rather find the right person before you've spent tens of thousands of euros on an attempt that didn't hold. That's the work I take on.

Why this niche

"Software consultant" tells a buyer nothing. Safety-critical embedded systems is a narrow claim, and narrow is the point — it's what makes the work legible and findable to the team that actually needs it, instead of the one shopping for the cheapest hour.

The second half of the focus is newer and just as deliberate. AI coding agents are genuinely useful on embedded codebases, but only once the surrounding infrastructure — reproducible builds, compile-time tests, mocked hardware, a software-in-the-loop harness — gives them a feedback loop they can trust. Most embedded codebases don't have that yet. Building it is where most of my work happens.

Background

Fifteen years of C++ and safety-critical embedded systems work sits behind this practice. In day-to-day terms that means reproducible builds, compile-time testing in C++, breaking hardware dependencies out so logic is testable without a board, and the feedback-loop infrastructure that makes AI coding agents usable on embedded codebases at all.

If any of that maps to a problem you're carrying, the blog works through the technical detail, the services page describes how an engagement is structured, and the fastest route to a conversation is the contact page.