Josh Berns

I build systems end to end, from the architecture down to the last millisecond.

Photographer turned engineer. Scroll and I'll walk you through the last six years.

Music and street photographer

I shot live music for artists and venues, spent nights on New York rooftops, and photographed the 2021 Presidential Inauguration for an ongoing series.

I wrote my own contract to sell my photos

There was no plug-and-play way to mint yet, so I learned to write and deploy my own smart contract. My first 1/1 went up on Foundation in December 2021 for under $100 in gas.

122 photographers, 39 countries

Camera Person was a web3 app and collection for photographers, with equal on-chain payouts to every artist. It's where I learned that software lets you build things that reach the whole world.

@camerapersonnft

Training models on real people

I trained Stable Diffusion models on my own face, then on each person I photographed in Marfa, Texas, back when getting a specific person to hold a specific expression on video was really hard. That led to producing AI video for an AMC documentary film.

Apps, and two of them sold

I freelanced and shipped my own products. I sold DoFDGPT, an AI tool for reading government contracts, and SnapCycle, an AI recycling assistant.

Mithril, my free on-device LLM app for iPhone, is rated 4.5★ on the App Store. Mithril Whisper, on-device dictation for desktop, is open source.

Mithril on the App Store · Mithril Whisper

Real-time data, then acquired

I built Polynode, a real-time Polymarket data API that decodes orders 3–5 seconds before they land onchain. agg.market acquired it in July 2026.

Before that, Quantish let AI agents trade prediction markets and moved about $500K in volume.

Read the announcement · Prediction News

Games, worlds and open source

Return of the Colossi: a Shadow of the Colossus homage, first playable in 48 hours with AI and open-source tools, now live in the browser.

Resident Evil 4: decompiled and modded in 12 hours, then running in the browser on WebAssembly and on ARM64 with no emulator.

llama.cpp: three merged pull requests.