Christian Smith, known online as RNVizion, is a Python developer building production AI systems on the Claude API, and a writer, based in Washington, DC. He ships retrieval systems, LLM agents, and the polished developer tools they run on, and writes about building technology with intention in the age of AI. His throughline is translation: taking complex technology and making it clear.
What he does now
Christian works in AR/VR at Meta as a Sales and Support Specialist in the Best Buy retail program, helping customers discover Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the Meta Quest headset family. The role spans live product demos, consultative selling, and hands-on technical support across the spatial-computing lineup; customer-facing technical work that pairs directly with his developer background.
What he builds
Most of what he builds now runs on top of large language models: Ask the Corpus, a retrieval-augmented chatbot over his own published writing, grounded and guardrailed and deployed live on Hugging Face; its quality is held by a continuous-integration gate, an evaluation suite that fails the build if retrieval accuracy slips, if the system stops refusing questions the corpus doesn't cover, or if it starts refusing ones it does. And the RNV Publishing Agent, an MCP server with a Claude-driven loop that validates a post's metadata, generates its index card, and refuses to publish anything that fails validation.
Separately, rnv-color-mcp: a color-computation server on the Model Context Protocol, published to the official MCP registry and listed in awesome-mcp-servers. One color engine exposed as nine deterministic tools an LLM can call; the model decides what the user wants, the tool returns the exact value, and it resolves or refuses rather than inventing one. It has since grown an OAuth 2.1 resource-server layer with RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata and enforced per-tool scopes. Built once to be consumed by anything: Claude today, a fashion-design app tomorrow.
And AIII, the Artificial Intelligence Identification Initiative: an Apache-2.0 reference implementation for AI agent identity, with the build record at rnvizion.dev/aiii. An identity-and-authorization layer for MCP servers, built on the same principle as the rest of the work: resolve or refuse, never guess.
Underneath the AI work sits the RNVizion toolkit: five professional open-source desktop applications built with Python and PyQt6: a text transformer, a color palette manager, a color picker, an icon builder, and a color mixer. Each ships with CLI support, multi-theme UIs, cross-platform CI, and comprehensive test coverage; 786 tests on the text transformer alone, and more than 5,000 across the whole portfolio. They're where the build-quality discipline started, before the AI work gave it more leverage.
His point of view
Christian's core argument, from his essay “The Job Was Never Coding,” is that AI didn't replace developers; it automated the translation layer, the typing, and left the thinking. The valuable work was never the code; it was deciding what to build, why, and how it should behave. He writes about “squish” (the felt quality that turns software that merely works into software people love) and about using the speed AI provides to buy back time for the human parts of building.
Background
- B.S. in Game Programming and Development.
- IT support and help-desk experience; Google IT Support certified.
- Technical content development and productivity consulting.
- Customer-facing work in regulated industries.
This mix of building, communicating, and supporting is what points him toward AI Engineering, Solutions Engineering, and Developer Advocacy.
Skills and stack
Languages: Python, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL, PowerShell. Frameworks and tooling: PyQt6, Unity, Unreal Engine, Git, GitHub Actions, pytest. AI tooling: the Anthropic Claude API, retrieval-augmented generation, ChromaDB, sentence-transformers, the Model Context Protocol, and Gradio. Identity and security: OAuth 2.1 resource servers, RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata, holder-of-key verification, and per-tool authorization scopes. Verification: property-based and snapshot testing, cross-platform CI, and CI-gated evaluation suites for the LLM work. AR/VR and 3D: Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta, zBrush, 3DS Max, Substance.
What he's looking for
Christian is open to remote AI Engineer, Solutions Engineer, and Developer Advocate roles; positions where he can build, communicate, and ship production systems at once, and where the job is as much translation as it is code.
Beyond code
Christian thinks of himself as a modern-day Renaissance man, working across development, writing, design, and making. He writes fiction, builds props and cosplay from scratch, studies philosophy, and treats range as a feature rather than a distraction. You can find him at rnvizion.dev, on GitHub, and on LinkedIn.