About Youssef Saad

The work I keep returning to sits between markets and machine learning, and specifically what an agent learns when you change the definition of a good outcome. That started as a research assistantship on a multi-agent market simulator and it is what I would like a thesis to be about.

I also run Piston, which builds AI front offices for small businesses. Running something that people depend on has changed how I work more than any course has. Mostly it taught me to distrust a result that arrives looking finished, and to go and check.

I serve at St. Moses and St. Katherine Coptic Orthodox Church. I prepare the orban for liturgy each week, I go out with the homeless outreach team around Toronto, and I have taught Sunday school to the three and four year olds. I spent a couple of years on the OCSA executive looking after the club’s finances.

Guitar was the one I wanted. My parents made the case for piano first, so I started there at four and came to the guitar in 2010, which turned out to be the right order even if I would not have agreed at the time. Since then it has taken me to talent shows, mission trips, carol services and a couple of times onto radio. Percussion came later and came easier; at sixteen I spent a fortnight teaching myself the whole of Shut Up and Dance so I could play it properly, and I have never quite lost the habit of learning a song that way. These days it is guitar and percussion with the church worship team, and I am teaching myself to DJ.

I build with Claude Code and Codex as working partners, usually three or more at once across different projects. Most of the effort goes into framing the problem, deciding what a real test looks like, and checking the output by hand. What ships is mine.