Christopher Burns founded Inth, which builds privacy compliance infrastructure for software teams, and created c15t, its open-source consent SDK. His work connects consent choices and privacy policies to application behavior: which scripts run, how data flows through a product, and whether changes introduce privacy problems.
Everfund and full-stack JavaScript
Burns began building businesses with Will De Ath after university. Their agency work included experiments with NFC and QR codes; a project for a local UK charity led them to co-found Everfund, a donation platform where Burns served as chief executive and lead developer. Everfund combined donation links, embeddable checkouts, and charity dashboards. Its infrastructure handled payment servers, recurring donations, and regulatory requirements so agencies could build fundraising experiences without recreating those systems for every client.
His approach to donation software accommodated different levels of technical control. A small charity could use a ready-made checkout, while a larger organization could build its own interface on the same infrastructure. Understandable tools for nonprofit staff and flexible building blocks for developers were complementary parts of the product.
Alongside Everfund, Burns co-hosted FSJam, a podcast exploring full-stack JavaScript, developer tools, and their builders from 2020 to 2023. He also built its TypeScript-powered website.
From fundraising to consent infrastructure
Everfund closed its service following a November 2024 notice. In his farewell essay, Burns reflected on seven years building software and a business, including supporting a local food bank during COVID. He considered taking an engineering role, but a privacy problem he had encountered at Everfund drew him back into founding: the relationship between consent systems, privacy policies, and trust in the software handling donations.
His second company began as Consent.io. By spring 2025, he had released c15t for developers who wanted consent infrastructure they could compose and inspect within their application stack. His founding principles emphasized open source, performance, granular control, and visibility into consent state. A cookie banner was the first workflow to improve; the work also addressed how an application enforces the choices collected through it.
c15t provides prebuilt interfaces and headless APIs, controls analytics and advertising scripts according to consent, and supports hosted or self-hosted backends for consent records and audit logs. Those pieces let developers connect the interface to the behavior it promises. Showing a banner is only one step; the application must also respect the person's choice.
Inth expands into privacy engineering
Burns renamed Consent.io to Inth on April 13, 2026, reflecting an expansion into privacy policies, data requests, vendor oversight, and compliance automation. Inth joined Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch. Its platform audits code, pull requests, and websites for privacy issues, including new data flows and discrepancies between loaded scripts, consent state, and policies.
Burns's privacy engineering approach follows product changes through their consequences. Adding an analytics SDK, for example, can change data handling and require consent controls, policy updates, and subsequent review. He advocates improving one workflow at a time while connecting it to the wider compliance process. Performance is another concern: he created Cookie Bench, an open-source benchmarking tool for examining how third-party components and services affect web performance.
Making documentation useful to coding agents
As coding agents began recommending and installing libraries, Burns extended his focus on developer experience to the documentation those agents consume. In his 2026 AI Engineer talk, he reported that recommendations from AI assistants had become c15t's largest inbound source, based on onboarding responses. He described several practical changes behind that work while cautioning that the field was changing quickly and his observations were not definitive scientific findings.
Agent-friendly web documentation: One change was to give agents a short, deliberately written documentation index rather than a large generated file full of noise. Another was to provide Markdown versions of pages, reducing the HTML an agent must process to reach useful content. His implementation made those versions accessible through .md URLs, requests accepting Markdown, and a query parameter for agents unable to set request headers. He also described early documentation tools for searching, retrieving pages, and asking questions through WebMCP, while acknowledging uncertainty about agent support for some discovery mechanisms.
Documentation inside the package: His most distinctive recommendation addressed where coding agents actually look for information. An agent working with an installed library may inspect its compiled source or rely on stale training knowledge without visiting the documentation website. Burns's team bundled Markdown documentation with the package and added an AGENTS.md file directing agents to it. That gives an agent working in node_modules a local route to documentation shipped with the installed library. He reported token savings approaching 50 percent across several models compared with finding documentation through web searches; the talk did not establish that result as a universal benchmark.
Lead Type: The team extracted these documentation tools into Lead Type, an open-source, framework-neutral pipeline that generates agent-oriented files from MDX. Burns also applied it to marketing pages, extending the same approach beyond developer documentation. His emphasis was on several small improvements to discovery and retrieval, with continued testing as agent behavior changes.
Presentations as interactive products
Burns applies a similar attention to interaction in his presentations. He built and open-sourced shadcn-deck, a Next.js presentation system with reusable React slides, presenter tools, and support for embedding interactive product components. His view of presentations as products treats a demo as another opportunity to show the performance and behavior of the software itself.
Christopher Burns traces how c15t made documentation easier for agents to find and use: concise indexes, Markdown delivery, queryable docs, and guidance bundled with the installed library.
A concise, handwritten llms.txt and a fuller annotated index solve different navigation problems: orientation and selection of the right page to fetch.
Bundle Markdown and AGENTS.md with a developer library, then tell consumers to point to the package guidance from their project’s root AGENTS.md. Leadtype’s current README reports about 29% unaided bundle discovery versus roughly 90–100% with that pointer; these evaluations are separate from the recording.
▶ Watch ↗