Projects
dui dui dui!
A Chinese language learning app with adaptive flashcards, a massive 180,000+ entry offline dictionary with natural audio, an AI tutor, and proficiency scores that measure what you actually know.
Benji’s Guide to Machine Creativity
A Substack newsletter exploring the underlying structures of creative work — worldbuilding, character design, narrative structure — written in collaboration with AI systems.
Essays range from the creative process itself (Proliferate/Consolidate) to deep dives on storytelling craft (The Antihero’s Journey), examining how creativity actually operates and how AI can learn to support it.
Shaxpir
Archived — April 2026A cloud-based writing platform designed for fiction authors building deep, immersive worlds. Not just a word processor — a complete workspace for brainstorming, outlining, world-building, drafting, and publishing.
Featured linguistic analysis tools including emotional journey visualization, sentiment analysis, and a ML-powered thesaurus. Available as a web app and desktop application with offline sync.
Services
Decades of dedicated tinkering expertise, available for your most interesting problems.
Product Engineering
Distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, full-stack development, and the kind of careful UI work that makes complex software feel obvious. The goal is always software that people actually enjoy using.
AI Consulting
Agentic loops, synthetic data pipelines, computational linguistics, and novel data analysis algorithms — designed to serve creative people. Grounded in years of shipping AI-driven tools to real users.
about
Red Thread is the work of Benji Smith — a software engineer who’s spent nearly 25 years building tools for people who make things. Language, storytelling, creative process.
Benji founded Shaxpir, a writing platform used by thousands of fiction authors, and recently launched dui dui dui!, a Chinese language learning app built on Bayesian proficiency modeling. He’s also the developer behind the Prosecraft.io text analysis project.
When he’s not building his own products, Benji is available for product engineering and AI consulting engagements.
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