Personal website for Aaron Brethorst - Seattleite, technology leader, photographer, transit enthusiast, erstwhile non-runner.
A greenhouse and a lens both run on sunlight, and they do opposite things with it. The greenhouse traps ambient heat and holds it, so everything inside grows a little faster than it would outside: flowers, herbs, weeds, whatever happens to be in the soil. The lens takes the same light and concentrates it on a single point until that point catches fire. One gathers energy and lets everything grow…
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll system you had to understand garnishments and pre-tax deductions and what happens when someone’s pay period straddles a rate change. Before you could ship a transit app you had to learn what a GTFS feed is, why a trip and a route aren’t the…
Last month I wrote that skills are the most underrated feature in agentic AI. Everything I’ve built since has made me more convinced. The latest example: a user-story-creator skill that I used to write a user story in the OneBusAway vehicle-positions project.
Agent Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and use on demand. They’re an open standard that works across Claude, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Cursor, and OpenAI’s Codex. A skill is just a directory with a SKILL.md file at its root, optionally accompanied by scripts, reference docs, and templates. That’s it. No fine-tuning, no model retraining, no API…
Stop having pet projects; that’s a Staff Engineer’s domain. For a manager, every project is cattle: it needs to be completed, automated, delegated, or cancelled.
I find the usual conversations about AI and creativity to be pretty boring - we’ve been talking about cameras and sampling for years now, and I’m not particularly interested in getting mired down in the muck of the morality and economics of it all. I’m really only interested in one question:\n\nWhat’s possible now that was impossible before?
Washington state has a larger economy than Argentina or Sweden. We’re home to two of the world’s five most valuable companies, a major aerospace manufacturer, the nation’s seventh-largest container port, and a $14 billion agricultural industry. Our state government manages a $78 billion biennial budget.
The nature of software development is changing out from under us, and I think we’re kidding ourselves that it’s going to end with just a reconfiguration of how professional developers ship software. I have kids. They have devices. I wanted some control over them. So I did what many of you would do in my situation: I vibe-coded an MDM.
What hath God wrought
This week, Washington state Representatives Hall, Callan, Reed, and Leavitt prefiled HB 2296, a bill that would legalize plug-in “balcony solar” systems in Washington. It’s modeled on Utah’s bipartisan HB 340, which passed unanimously last year, but improves on it in ways that matter for renters and condo owners. The legislature should pass it.