Jimmy Koppel

He grew up in West St. Louis County; the speaker biography of the Strange Loop conference also calls him a native of St. Louis. The St. Louis Jewish Light writes that his parents knew early on that he was extremely bright; his mother recalled that at the age of one, before he could talk, he would spread out 100-piece puzzles, crawl around and put them together. The article adds that at five he said he wanted to be an entrepreneur like Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry, and that at 10 he decided he would grow up to make video games.⁠[1][2]

He started at McKelvey Elementary, but he was so far ahead of his classmates that his parents homeschooled him; from sixth grade he attended the St. Louis Regional Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students, taking classes at Lindbergh High School, and he graduated at 17. In a 2019 podcast he mentioned that he took his first computer science class in high school.⁠[1][3]

At Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry he majored in computer science and mathematical sciences. CMU News writes that near the end of his first year he “woke up and realized something was wrong” and resolved to eliminate the tedious parts of software development, after which he focused his studies on static analysis and programming languages and began working with Jonathan Aldrich in the Institute for Software Research; he later narrowed his focus to automating architectural changes, which often require small, similar edits in thousands of places.⁠[4]

He was a teaching assistant for the course 15-251, “Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science,” and an active member of the university’s programming competition teams; CMU News wrote on July 2, 2012 that his team had tied for 18th place at the ACM-ICPC World Finals in Warsaw, Poland, the previous month. His biography on the Mirdin website lists this result as an Honorable Mention at the 2012 ACM-ICPC World Finals.⁠[4][5]

On June 12, 2012, VentureBeat published the new class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, founded by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, and he was on the list, which gives his hometown as St. Louis, MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry, and says that he had a passion for software engineering and a plan to make it much more efficient: modifying software often involves hundreds of thousands of small, similar adjustments that require a great deal of time and money, and he would develop new tools to automate the process.⁠[6][4]

A Carnegie Mellon University news brief of July 2, 2012 states that he, then 20, was one of 20 young entrepreneurs chosen for the Thiel Foundation’s second “20 Under 20” class; the two-year fellowship includes $100,000 and mentorship from the foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists. The brief adds that applications for this class came from more than 40 countries and more than 350 high schools, colleges and graduate schools, and quotes Jonathan Cain, president of the Thiel Foundation: “We continue to be blown away by the quality of ideas coming from 20 Under 20 applicants.”⁠[4]

Accounts of his studies in 2012 differ. CMU News describes him as a senior who had taken summer courses to complete his dual degree, expected in December, and who had left the mathematics master’s program; the St. Louis Jewish Light writes that he had finished his coursework at Carnegie Mellon University and would receive dual degrees in computer science and mathematics in December, and his mother, Suellen M. Koppel, said he finished at Carnegie Mellon University in three years. In a 2019 podcast he himself recalled that when he was selected in 2012 he was a junior at Carnegie Mellon University: “I did not have a senior year. I just left.” He said he still graduated with two degrees because he had worked very hard in those three years, and that he had planned to do a master’s but dropped out. His biography on the Mirdin website lists a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012.⁠[4][1][3][5]

An article in the St. Louis Jewish Light of August 2, 2012 states that, speaking by phone from San Francisco eight days after the fellows were announced, he said the grant had already changed his life and that without it he would probably be working in an office rather than talking to a reporter from his living room. He said that over the next two years he would research new software development tools, taking the Y2K problem as an example: shortening four-digit years to two digits was a small change, but it had to be made in thousands of places, and the fix cost $300 billion; he was building tools to automate tasks with those characteristics and considered the fellowship the best way to pursue the problem. CMU News uses the same Y2K example and also puts the cost of the fix at $300 billion.⁠[1][4]

In the same article Jonathan Cain said that “Jimmy has a vision where programmers are more like builders than handymen,” and that he was working on systems that would enable the manipulation of programs without access to their source code.⁠[1]

The fellowship requires recipients to leave school to pursue their projects, which at first worried his parents. His mother said that when he said he had applied for the grant and would drop out of college if he got it, “we were not thrilled”; his father, Ralph Koppel, said, “What truly is amazing about Jim is his drive,” and “He has extremely high ambitions and he totally devotes himself to them.” The article adds that before the grant he had talked with his father about the “Ramen noodle lifestyle.” Both parents said they were delighted that he would have mentors and financial support.⁠[1]

The Strange Loop conference’s speaker biography states that before MITMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry he was the third employee of Apptimize and the founder of Tarski Technologies, a startup pursuing automated bug-fixing.⁠[2]

In his biography on the Mirdin website he writes that he founded a developer tools company and worked for two more, and that starting at Apptimize at the age of 21 was his first experience working for someone else since graduating a year and a half earlier.⁠[5]

In a 2019 podcast he recalled that of the two-year fellowship he spent about a year and a half at a company trying to write a program that fixed bugs in other programs, which “wound up not going so well”; he attributed this to the immaturity of the technology, to his learning as he went, and to the lesson that “a good product idea is not a good business idea.”⁠[3]

His biography on the Mirdin website lists an NSF Fellowship in 2015.⁠[5]

In his biography on the Mirdin website he writes that since the age of 18 he has been obsessed with the problem of automating software maintenance, which led him to become deeply knowledgeable about the theory of programming languages and program analysis; the host of the CoRecursive podcast also quoted this sentence from his website in 2019. He writes that at 19 he began to think about how his technical training in formal verification and program analysis could lead to deep principles about how to write better software, and that after a few occasions sharing his knowledge he realized “I could have far greater impact in an hour of coaching than an hour of coding,” and started coaching professionally in early 2016. The page also lists him as an Associate Certified Coach of the International Coaching Federation. The site description of his blog, Path-Sensitive, calls him an MIT PhD and the founder of Mirdin.⁠[5][3][7]

His biography on the Mirdin website lists an M.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.⁠[5]

On August 16, 2019 the CoRecursive podcast, hosted by Adam Gordon Bell, released episode 36, “Advanced Software Design,” with him as the guest. The episode introduction describes him as working on a PhD in program synthesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as teaching people to design better software, drawing on insights from his program synthesis work.⁠[3]

In the episode he described his “advanced software design web course,” which offers a lot of practice with feedback on that practice, and said the next run would start on August 23 and take 15 people; he also offered coaching and had written a booklet, “Seven Mistakes that Cause Fragile Code.” He called his method the RAD process, “reduce assumptions, add openness, diminish complexity ratchets,” and described it as a “forced acronym.”⁠[3]

He said that his life goal is to improve software maintenance by a factor of 100: one factor of 10 must come from developers’ habits of reasoning about the logic of code and limiting assumptions, and “the other 10x is going to have to come from tools.” He described “Don't repeat yourself” as a simplified version of the real lesson, which is not to repeat concepts; said he had found no book he would call an advanced software design book because “no one knows how to teach it, and my work has changed that”; and said, “I don't think anyone alive today deserves the title 'Grandmaster Programmer.'” He recommended reading programming books with the method Benjamin FranklinBenjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was a printer, publisher, scientist, diplomat, and statesman of colonial North America and the founding era of the United States, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. In Philadelphia he ran the Pennsylvania Gazette and published Poor Richard’s Almanack, founded the first lending library in North America, and proposed the school that later became the University of Pennsylvania; known for his electrical experiments and inventions such as the lightning rod, he served as the first Postmaster General of the United States, took part in drafting the Declaration of Independence, signed the treaty between the United States and France while in France, and signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.Open the full entry described in his autobiography for improving his writing without a teacher: write a description of what a program snippet does, come back a few days later and write the program from it; a cheaper version is to look at the page, flip it over, look away and try to write the program.⁠[3]

He also recalled spending a few months, a summer, at Semantic Designs, a company in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, a few years earlier, when he had a car, which he had not had since leaving CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. He described a project there of design recovery for a large chemical company with about a thousand plants: the plants’ control code was written in an obsolete language, and the team used decompilation to recover high-level operations and translate them into Python; by the date of the recording it had probably ported over a hundred plants.⁠[3]

In September 2021 his doctoral thesis in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Meta-metaprogramming,” was issued and deposited in DSpace@MIT; his advisor was Armando Solar-Lezama. Addressing the high cost of building advanced programming tools for complex languages, the thesis presents three techniques for sharing implementation code among similar tools for different languages: losslessly rewriting code across many languages, generating a family of tools from a language’s semantics, and a new representation for sets of programs usable across languages and synthesis tasks. His biography on the Mirdin website lists the degree as a Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2021, and describes the dissertation as ways to make program transformation and synthesis tools easier to build and more general.⁠[8][5]

His profile on conf.researchr.org lists his affiliation as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lists him as a program committee member of the Onward! Papers track of SPLASH 2026.⁠[9]

The Strange Loop conference’s speaker biography describes him as, then, a PhD candidate in the Computer-Aided Programming Group at MIT: by day he worked at MIT on making program transformation and synthesis tools easier to build (“programs that write programs that write programs”), and by night he taught software engineers how to write better code. His talk at the conference, “You are a Program Synthesizer,” explains what program synthesis and verification can teach about ordinary programming and what makes good versus bad code.⁠[2]

In the 2019 CoRecursive episode he confirmed that Cubix was his framework (the episode page links it as the “Cubix Multi-Language Transformation Tool”), and said that he had just submitted a paper on Mandate to the POPL conference.⁠[3]

His profile on conf.researchr.org lists his research interests as software language engineering, program transformation, generic programming and causal inference, and lists conference papers of which he is an author: at SPLASH 2017 (posters), “QuixBugs: A Multi-Lingual Program Repair Benchmark Set Based on the Quixey Challenge” and “Incremental Parametric Syntax for Multi-Language Transformation”; in 2018, “Capturing the Future by Replaying the Past (Functional Pearl)” at ICFP and “One Tool, Many Languages: Language-Parametric Transformation with Incremental Parametric Syntax” at SPLASH (OOPSLA), which was also listed that year in the SPLASH Artifacts and Posters tracks and presented as a preview at the PLATEAU 2018 workshop; in 2020, “Semantic Code Search via Equational Reasoning” at PLDI and “Demystifying Dependence” at SPLASH Onward!, also listed in the SPLASH 2020 Posters track; in 2021, “Dynamic Scope + Laziness = Counterfactuals” at HOPE, while the SIGPLAN Papers track of SPLASH that year also listed “Semantic Code Search via Equational Reasoning” and “Demystifying Dependence”; in 2022, “Searching Entangled Program Spaces” and “Automatically Deriving Control-Flow Graph Generators From Operational Semantics” at ICFP, and “E-Graphs, VSAs, and Tree Automata: a Rosetta Stone” and “ECTAs: E-Graphs Better (at Encoding)” at the EGRAPHS workshop; and in 2023, “Spectacular: Finding Laws from 25 Trillion Programs” at ICST and “Typed Multi-Language Strategy Combinators” at EVCS.⁠[9]

The profile also lists other academic roles: in 2020 he presented the ICFP tutorial “Building Multi-Language Tools with Cubix” and was a mentor at PLMW at SPLASH 2020; in 2021 he chaired the session “PLDI 2021, PLDI 2020, and OOPSLA 2020 Papers 1” in the SIGPLAN Papers track of SPLASH; and in 2022 he was a program committee member of Haskell 2022 and chair of its Embedded DSLs session.⁠[9]

His biography on the Mirdin website lists 6 patents in the areas of binary modification and mobile A/B testing.⁠[5]

His mother, Suellen M. Koppel, is an industrial organization psychologist, and his father, Ralph Koppel, owns a computer software business; he has an older sister, Julie Ann, who had recently completed pharmacy school in 2012. He was a member of Congregation Shaare Emeth.⁠[1]

The 2012 article states that he holds a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Doh, which he practiced for 12 years, and a “5th degree white belt” in Shotokan Karate, and that he began piano lessons the summer after his freshman year of college. He said his list of leisure activities is short because he spends most of his days working.⁠[1]

Personal website: https://www.pathsensitive.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][7]

Carnegie Mellon University: Official website: https://www.cmu.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Mirdin: Official website: https://mirdin.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jimmykoppel (opens in a new window).⁠[2][3]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/jkoppel (opens in a new window).⁠[2]