I am slightly embarrassed but also pleased to say that the inline syntax does work. However because of the default options it is hard to tell.
I read through most of the Chirpy code base as well as the code base for UglifyJS to figure out that Chirpy just sets all the values for the options to false. This means it doesn't require much of your JavaScript code.
To turn on the strictest JSHint options, using this at the top of your JS file:
/*jshint bitwise: true, curly: true, eqeqeq: true, immed: true, newcap: true,
noarg: true, noempty: true, nonew: true, nomen: true, onevar: true,
plusplus: true, regexp: true, undef: true, strict: true, white: true */
Note, you cannot put a space between /* and jshint. Chirpy will ignore it if you do.