Chris Zhang — Time is currency.

CHRIS ZHANG

Builds tools that remove friction. Former Big 4 auditor.

Audit → finance → AI Builder · systems × product

What I Build — 5 Plates

skip archive ↓

Friction → AI cost opacity

DevValue

Live F flip for how + results

↗ install

DevValue

Cost = (your focus time × your hourly rate) + (AI agent token cost). DevValue surfaces both inside VS Code, broken down per branch, so the bill is visible before it shows up.

PTA flow: Idle-timeout that recognizes thinking time, not just typing
Token sniff: Parses Claude Code logs for real compute cost
Branch bind: Every cost tagged to a git branch
Status bar: Live time · branch · cost in your editor frame
Stack: TypeScript · VS Code API · local SQLite

Press F again to flip back

01 / 05 · DevValue

Friction → Manual airport charging schedules

Smart Airport

walkthrough video

Capstone F flip for how

Vancouver Airport Authority · MS Capstone

eGSE charging optimization

Raw flight / fleet / charger / spatial data → preprocess + feature engineering → Transformer demand forecasts → Gymnasium environment + PPO policies (Stable-Baselines3) for AC and non-AC fleets. DVC for artifacts, MLflow for experiments, FastAPI + Uvicorn for inference — same stack as the Space below.

Live demo (interactive)

Open Hugging Face Space ↗

90%

Gate coverage

9.2%

vs. baseline

GitHub ↗ HF Space ↗ LinkedIn ↗

02 / 05 · Smart Airport

Friction → Canadian payroll complexity

Cleanroll

Beta F flip for how + demo

Cleanroll · Beta · Render

Payroll, as one run

The one-bookkeeper company spends a full morning bouncing between six windows just to pay people. Cleanroll collapses that into one guided flow — setup, run, signed stub, CRA-ready.

CPP / EI / QPP · federal & provincial tax
Signed pay stubs · CRA-ready exports
Designed for one-bookkeeper Canadian SMBs
Stack: FastAPI · Postgres · Render · React

Try the app ↗

Onboarding first Canadian small businesses

03 / 05 · Cleanroll

Friction → Foreign-menu decision anxiety

Nod

TestFlight F flip for how + prototype

10:57

Nod — Snap, Decode, Trust. How are you dining today?

Tap Grand Feast, Agent Chat, or Solo — mockup explains each path.

Nod · TestFlight · iOS mockup

Ambrosia · manager-worker agents

Decide in 30 seconds.

Point the camera at a menu in any language. The Eye digitises it, the Brain translates culturally — not literally — and a Gatekeeper critic blocks anything that touches your allergies, even when the Brain suggested it.

Eye + Brain + Gatekeeper · OCR capture, ranking, and allergy veto in one loop.
Agent Chat mode · you steer the conversation while agents propose and self-check.
Platform target · iOS 26.1 · SwiftUI · Liquid Glass (TestFlight may trail roadmap).

Demo mode · interactive prototype

Grand Feast → Table mode: merges constraints across guests and returns 3 dishes with overlap-safe substitutions.

TestFlight · invite on request

On-card taps are a guided mockup, not the production app binary.

04 / 05 · Nod

Question → Thinking alongside machines

CyberTao

Live F flip for site

↗ open site

05 / 05 · CyberTao

01 / 05

Interests

Personal Tool

FlashSlot

ICBC road-test watcher that scans openings and sends alerts as soon as a slot appears in my target window.

Python · Playwright · Pushover

click for details

FlashSlot · Details

Polls calendar windows and dedupes stale alerts.
Personal agent to remove repetitive booking refresh loops.
Runs privately on my own infra.

Personal System

FFP

Single-tenant loyalty tracker across Aeroplan, Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Amex MR with expiry/devaluation reminders.

FastAPI · Postgres · cron

click for details

FFP · Details

Tracks loyalty balances in one quiet dashboard.
Alerts on expiry, transfer-bonus windows, and devaluation risk.
Single-tenant by design.

Movement · Column

Mettle

Cycling, hiking, the gym — and the column where I write about movement as thinking, and where human effort and machine compute rhyme.

Cadence · trails · iron

click for details

Mettle · Details

Throughput, cooling, throttling — the body has a compute budget too.
Where ideas actually resolve: mid-ride, mid-trail, mid-set.
Published as a column on Substack.

Background

Currently

Technology Risk — KPMG (Vancouver)
MS Computer Science — Northeastern, 2026

Previously

Audit & Assurance — Deloitte
Finance Controller — Nanjing Vanke

Interests

Human-AI decision workflows
Product strategy + delivery systems

Also

Career Peer Advisor @ CDEL
MS Student Advisory Board

Developing

DevValue — sharpening the per-branch true-cost model: your time + the model's tokens
Cleanroll — getting the first Canadian small businesses onto automated payroll & tax
Smart Airport — iterating the live e-GSE dispatch demo from the YVR capstone