Ian Smith is the CTO and co-founder of LYOS. After starting his career at research labs like Xerox PARC and Intel Research, he now builds startups and explores human-directed AI coding.
He recently built Mazarin, an open-source microkernel OS, completely through AI-assisted development. He focuses on the process behind this—showing how senior engineers must decompose hard problems like virtual memory so AI tools can actually handle them.
He holds over 10 patents and has been writing Go since before the language had an error interface.