Will Sentance
I am a founder focused on the mission of re-industrialization in the West. I'm currently working on embodied AI at South Park Commons, and conducting research as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. Previously, I founded Codesmith and produce tech workshops with FEM.
My Missions
Reindustrialization & Embodied AI
Industry is what made America, and revitalizing it requires a deep partnership between human ingenuity and frontier technology. Software is moving off the screen and into the physical world. My current work centers on building tools and communities for Embodied AI, creating neural interfaces that make physical matter as directly programmable as software environments.
Platform + People
I founded Codesmith on the belief that access to complex mental models is the greatest bottleneck to human potential. Over ten years as CEO, scaling the company into a premier engineering residency, it became clear that true institutional impact requires combining scalable technical platforms with deep human capital.
Open Source Understanding
The ability to see how a system actually works is the difference between being a user of a technology and a participant in it. Open source fundamentally pushes back against the principle of barriers to participation. I believe in this format as the key to unlocking workforce development.
Mentorship Through Explanation
What gets mistaken for a lack of talent is often just a lack of access to a useful model. A good explanation is the work of fixing that. The goal is always to build the smallest mental model that generates the behavior you see, teaching toward independence rather than dependence. This is the key to bolstering potential.
Selected Projects & Writing
The Hard Parts
People are handed fashionable categories and syntax, and only much later do they encounter the forces underneath. The Hard Parts is my series covering these forces.
- Neural Networks - Under-the-hood fundamentals for modern AI systems.
- JavaScript: The Hard Parts - The mechanisms beneath familiar behavior.
- Servers & Node.js - Practical models for backend architecture.
- UI Development - A first-principles account of modern interface systems.
- AI Agents (Forthcoming)
Conversations
More About Me
I studied at the University of Oxford, where foundational work conducted at the United Nations initiated my focus on the intersection of technology, policy, and global infrastructure. Following a fellowship at Harvard University, I built open-source platforms on top of WebRTC before founding Codesmith.
As CEO, I scaled the company into an industry-leading residency, recently culminating in a $118m AI-first workforce development partnership with the US Treasury. Today, I focus on the structural shifts in how we build, researching macro-trends of modern work and robotics at Oxford University (OII), while developing applied AI tools at South Park Commons.