Software engineer at Meta and contributor to open source, working primarily on developer tools. Current interests include programming languages and formal verification. Notable past projects include pipx (6.4M downloads/month) and gdbgui. I will be speaking at the LLVM Developers' Meeting 2026 about adding null pointer dereference warnings to Clang.
Past work: Software, avionics, and GNC at NASA, Boeing, and Kitty Hawk/Wisk. Contributor to LLVM.
Real-time Lake Tahoe road conditions, about 150k visitors a winter
The ideas that led to LLMs, told as a story, from 1950s linguistics to RLHF, with live widgets
View and control any terminal from your browser, end-to-end encrypted
Share your Claude Code terminal session live via a link
Your local forecast the way it looked in 1993. Local on the 8s, smooth jazz included
Forecasts from weather.gov, served by a binary compiled with Milo
Disposable, encrypted, zero-signup chat rooms
Shared todo lists with live sync. Works offline as a PWA
Writing on compilers, developer tools, and building with AI
A fork of Clang that identifies null pointer dereferences at compile time. Rolled out at scale across Meta's monorepo to catch and fix production issues before they ship.
A memory-safe systems language compiling to native code via LLVM. Rust-level safety without lifetimes. Uses second-class references and move semantics instead. No garbage collector. Inspired in part by Graydon Hoare's reflection that Rust should have had second-class references.
A compiled programming language with TypeScript syntax, targeting native code via LLVM. Self-hosting, 621+ tests, sub-millisecond startup. Demo app at chadsmith.dev/chadscript/hn/.
A quantitative comparison of 23 programming languages running the same problems, measured automatically. Radar charts, tables, and metrics across safety, explicitness, and ergonomics.
I created pipx to make installing Python CLI tools easier. It runs them in isolated environments without polluting your system. Now maintained by the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA).
Born from debugging flight software on hardware-in-the-loop test rigs. A browser-based GDB frontend. Set breakpoints, step through code, and visualize data structures for C, C++, Go, Rust, and Fortran.
View and control terminals from any browser with end-to-end encryption (AES-128-GCM). The server is a blind relay, so it never sees your data.