Stijn Smit

Stijn Smit is the founder of STN Studio, an Amsterdam-based AI implementation studio. His working philosophy cuts against the grain of most AI consultancy: he starts with the stuck workflow, not the technology stack. Engagements begin only after a pilot proves value, and he builds RAG chatbots, LLM dashboards, and internal tools only when the evidence demands it. It's a practitioner's posture — earned, not performed.

His most visible project is Back to Being: in summer 2026, Stijn walked the Camino Portugués (Valença to Santiago, 127 km, 6 days) alongside fellow AI founders Max Helmantel and Caesar Schoorl, shipping a mental health app in parallel with the walk. The app — Het Mentale Weerbericht (Mental Weather Report) — reduces daily wellbeing check-ins to a single question answered through weather metaphors. At the end of the walk, he donated it free of charge to Stichting MIND, a Dutch national mental health foundation. A documentary about the project premieres 3 November 2026. Sponsors include Anthropic, n8n, Wispr Flow, Remote, and Watermelon AI.

Stijn studied Ad Smart Media Production at HvA (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), which explains the particular combination of design sensibility — HTML pitch decks, documentary filmmaking — and technical build capability. He uses his GitHub primarily as a delivery surface for partnership pitches and working prototypes, and his starred repos (Andrej Karpathy's Claude Code behaviour guide, markitdown) signal genuine engagement with the LLM developer tooling ecosystem.