Jason Burns

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

Meet Alfred, the Server That Runs the House

For a while my setup was split across two machines. Home Assistant lived on my Synology NAS, alongside the Mosquitto MQTT broker and ring-mqtt, while Frigate ran on a separate custom rackmount PC. It worked, but two things kept nagging…

July 24, 2026Computers, Home Automation, Product Thinking

Diagram of four new product skills for building on AI models: designing evals, choosing models and where they run, orchestrating agents, and setting confidence thresholds.

What Building a Pile of Small AI Projects Taught Me About the PM Job

The tools let me build things I never could have built alone. What surprised me is which parts of the product job got more important, not less.

July 20, 2026Product Management, Product Thinking

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my…

July 14, 2026AI Projects, Development, Home Automation

Introducing Cruxwire: a personal news digest that runs on your own hardware

I read too much news, badly. A dozen RSS feeds, three "read it later" apps I never went back to, and the creeping sense that the algorithm-driven version of all this was optimizing for someone else's goals, not mine. So…

June 24, 2026AI Projects, Development, Updates

How Claude Updates the Backlog on My Team of One

Last month I wrote about how a PM ships software without an engineering team. The short version: Claude Code closed the gap between an idea and a running product, so I could spend my time on the parts of the…

June 16, 2026Development, Product Management

Ceres Update: From Empty Scaffold to a Garden That Talks Back

Seventy-four commits across one weekend took Ceres, the multi-agent assistant for Kim's garden, from a bare scaffold to a working assistant that transcribes voice notes, diagnoses plant photos, answers questions, plans the watering, and runs a scheduled daily briefing from an orchestrated roster of specialist agents.

June 15, 2026AI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead

Backyard Birds Is Available, and Learns to Doubt Itself

The Backyard Birds dashboard is now on GitHub. The follow-up release did not add the notifications I promised. It added clips, reference calls, weather, and a way to tell BirdNET when it is wrong.

June 11, 2026Birding, Development