Chad Smith
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 (pre-AI) include pipx (6.4M downloads/month) and gdbgui.
Past work: Software, avionics, and GNC at NASA, Boeing, and Kitty Hawk/Wisk. Contributor to LLVM.
Live Apps
Fly real cities in the browser, under the weather happening there now
Point your phone camera at your face and watch your live pulse, read from tiny color changes in your skin. Runs entirely on your device; no video or data collected
Disposable, encrypted, zero-signup chat rooms
View and control any terminal from your browser, end-to-end encrypted
Shared todo lists with live sync. Works offline as a PWA
Forecasts from weather.gov, served by a binary compiled with Milo
Live radar of every plane around you: type, speed, route, and an engineer mode with Mach and physics. Milo binary on ADS-B data
The social network for engineers and builders.
Is a tsunami coming where you are? Danger zones, warning-center bulletins and safe ground, in plain words. Milo binary on NOAA data
Was that an earthquake? How hard the last 30 days of quakes shook where you are, in plain words. Milo binary on USGS data
Real-time Lake Tahoe road conditions, about 150k visitors a winter
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
The ideas that led to LLMs, told as a story, from 1950s linguistics to RLHF, with live widgets
The incompleteness theorems, one idea at a time, in a paper diorama you scroll through
Featured Projects
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.
A debugger with a web UI that speaks the Debug Adapter Protocol, so one frontend drives any language with a DAP adapter. Written in Milo.
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.