Software engineer building developer tools, programming languages, and open source infrastructure.
Forecasts from weather.gov — served by a Milo binary
Shared todo lists with live sync — works offline as a PWA
Disposable, encrypted, zero-signup chat rooms
The ideas that led to LLMs, told as a story — from 1950s linguistics to RLHF, with live widgets
Singular value decomposition built up interactively, from vectors to image compression
Stanford CS336's 18 LLM lectures distilled into a one-page map
Real-time Lake Tahoe road conditions
Share your Claude Code terminal session live via a link
View and control any terminal from your browser, end-to-end encrypted
Writing on compilers, developer tools, and building with AI
I'm a software engineer, currently a Tech Lead at Meta for the Developer Tools pillar across Reality Labs — IDE, debugging, language services, and build tooling. Recently I have been building agentic workflows and integrations. Generally I have been working on tools to improve the inner loop (code, build, test, repeat). I take extreme ownership of tooling, changing things from LLDB's Android platform code to building UI's.
Before Meta, I worked on safety-critical flight software and avioics for the Space Shuttle, Boeing Aircraft, and Larry Page's eVTOL flying car company Kitty Hawk/Wisk. That background gave me a deep passion for safe, correct code and static analysis.
With AI, I believe we can completely reimagine and rewrite software to be safer and faster. To that end, I have been working on compilers (with the help of 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 apps at chadsmith.dev/chadscript/.
A quantitative comparison of 23 programming languages — same problems, measured automatically. Radar charts, tables, and metrics across safety, explicitness, and ergonomics.
I created pipx to make installing Python CLI tools easier — run 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 — it never sees your data.