Tony Sharon

The path

Seven stages, in order. The dates matter less than what each stage established, because each one handed something to the next, and three of them set standards he still ships to.

  1. Technician's bench

    He sold on eBay at fifteen and went to work as a paintball technician, repairing customers' equipment at the counter, on deadline, with the owner waiting. It was an early education in finishing work that someone else is counting on.

  2. Technician to general manager

    He became general manager of the largest paintball company in Minnesota, responsible for the retail store, the park, and a seasonal event with a cast of 40. He served as Midwest technical support lead for the major paintball marker brands and directed product development, from bolt designs and a titanium barrel set to an apparel line, with manufacturing overseas. That job set the first standard he still ships to: a product is done when a stranger can use it.

  3. Operations, and the systems that outlasted the job

    As warehouse coordinator at the Valley Outreach food shelf, he ran shipping and receiving, box truck logistics, volunteer drivers, and contractors. Then he built what the role did not ask for: a visual task board that replaced the volunteer schedule, standardized intake and output tracking, safety training scripts written for broadcast, and an efficiency study that found $6,240 a year of wasted walk time. The second standard came from here: the fix that sticks is a system, not a reminder.

  4. Fabrication for paying customers

    He took commissions for signage, sculpture, and functional parts, built from laser-cut layers, resin, LED neon, 3D printing, and hand finishing. One piece, an eight-layer bike shop sign, combined five of those processes, each sequenced so that none ruined the one before it.

  5. Founding Pathfinder Prototyping

    He founded Pathfinder Prototyping on a plan he wrote himself, the business plan, the brand identity, the website, the financial models, and the equipment strategy, then ran the company he had planned. That set the third standard: the person who can write the whole plan can build the whole thing.

  6. Crossing into AI

    He earned 37 certificates in eleven months, then built what the certificates do not teach: a knowledge base searchable by meaning, seven MCP servers written from scratch, AI agents running across three machines, and the production line that turned one plugin into 45.

  7. Now

    Today he runs an independent practice that builds custom AI tools for businesses, and it hands over everything it builds. The three standards above are the ones a client's system is built to.

Principles, as shipped

Any site can list values. These six are enforced in shipped products, and each one is shown with the listing that ships it.

A key that quietly does nothing is worse than one that tells you.

Plasticity Hotkeys. Plasticity ships 61 of its commands with no keyboard shortcut. Until the bindings are installed, those keys show the deck's alert instead of pretending to work.

Never a stale number.

Krita Complete. When Krita is not running, the dial strip shows a dash and never the last value it saw, so a number on the strip is always current.

Destructive commands ship un-placed.

Phone Link Hotkeys. The command that clears every notification is reachable only through the plugin's settings panel, so a stray press can never wipe the list.

Ask the app, not the guess.

SOLIDWORKS Hotkeys. Commands that can fail silently go through the native API, so a refused command never looks like a finished one.

Say what it does not do.

Two listings. The SOLIDWORKS listing names the one Stream Deck model it does not cover. The OneNote listing names the three OneNote versions it does not work with. The buyer finds out before paying.

No lock-in, no rent.

The whole line. Every paid plugin is a one-time purchase, never a subscription. Excalidraw's listing says it plainly: no account, no cloud services, no telemetry. Custom work is handed over with the source.