Jason Burns

Two More Frets: Designing a One-Off PRS Private Stock

PS #8060 is a PRS Private Stock 509 with 24 frets, and as far as I know the only one that exists. The story of designing it with Paul Reed Smith, picking the wood by hand in the Private Stock vault, and the day in Maryland that made it happen.

August 25, 2026Guitar

Sumline Is on GitHub

Before anything else, go buy Soulver. It is the app that worked out the notepad calculator idea, it has been on my Mac for years, and it is one of the few paid apps I would buy again without thinking…

August 19, 2026Development, Productivity

I Stopped Chatting and Started Filing Issues

Chat is a good scratchpad and a terrible filing cabinet. I moved the actual conversation into Gitea issues, and my projects stopped stalling.

August 17, 2026AI Projects, Development, Product Thinking

The LLM Tax, Revisited: Cost, Latency, and Where to Run the Model

Quality, cost, and latency. You can usually have two. Here is the framework I use to pick which two on purpose, with a voice assistant, an RSS scorer, and a Frigate box as the worked examples.

August 12, 2026AI Projects, Product Thinking

My AI-Native PM Operating System: Idea to Shipped, Solo

The gap between an idea and a working product used to be an engineering team. Here's the whole loop I run now: spec first, backlog in Gitea, Claude Code doing the building, and me making the calls that actually matter. Including the two features I shipped and then threw out.

August 8, 2026Development, Product Management, Product Thinking

Ripping the Keepers, Selling the Rest: The Tool I Built to Clear My Blu-ray Shelf

I've been on streaming so long that the shelf of Blu-rays behind me had turned into furniture. The keepers stayed, and I decided to sell the rest. Selling a few hundred discs one at a time is its own part-time job, so I built a little tool to do the boring parts: scan every barcode, look up what each disc is, figure out the handful worth selling alone, bundle the rest into themed lots, price them, and spit out eBay listing sheets. Here's what it does, and the one pricing lesson that changed how the whole thing works.

July 31, 2026AI Projects, Development

What I Learned Shipping a Multi-Agent System

I planned Ceres with seven specialist agents and cut half of them in the first week. The surviving ones still broke, just not the way I expected. They gave me good answers and then quietly assumed somebody acted on them. What that taught me about restraint, state, and where the real work in a multi-agent system actually lives.

July 27, 2026AI Projects, Development, Product Thinking