Aaron Wells Does Not Write Code

He did not write the video platform. He has not written any of it: not the company website, rebuilt from the ground up to replace an old WordPress install, forty-six pages across twenty-two tracked releases, with a landing page for each of the thirty-five cities in Maricopa and Pinal counties, including Mammoth, a mining town on the San Pedro River, founded in 1876, that is not, strictly speaking, a hot market; not the admin panel that lets him add a shoot, reorder a portfolio of roughly 3,470 images, and redeploy the site with one button, through a daemon that keeps the web tier from ever holding a shell; not the analytics he put in when he took Google’s trackers off the site; not the dozen-odd scheduled jobs that back up, monitor, and patch the server, including the one that will apply a kernel update but will not reboot while a video is encoding. He directs the work. The code is written by an AI, against a specification he writes first.

The specification says what the system must do, what it must never do, and how he will know it is correct, and it is written before anything is built. The work goes out in scoped increments rather than one large request. What comes back gets read, exercised, and checked for where it diverges, and nothing is accepted until it has been verified against a live system, with a dated backup and a documented way to roll back in place first. He is precise about the boundary. He is not a software engineer and does not claim to be. What he claims is the business: thirty-five years of knowing which requirements are right, which trade-offs are acceptable, and when a thing is subtly wrong even though it technically runs.

In January 2026 he founded BLUFify Media, a two-person Arizona company that applied the intelligence community’s analytic tradecraft to the ordinary news: ninety outlets graded separately on bias and on factuality, confidence language tied to evidence thresholds under the same directive the analysts use, and a second model checking the first for anything it had made up. At its peak the platform tracked 177 sources across fourteen sectors and produced 1,864 briefings, three a day, on 23,645 lines of Python that he directed and did not write. It never had a paying customer. It paused in May under bootstrap funding pressure, documented for relaunch, every file carrying a checksum. He states the part about customers plainly, which is the point of the whole exercise.

He started in the news business in 1989, at sixteen, at a local newspaper, when production meant newsprint on enormous spools, paste-up, and pica rules, and the deadline was whenever the press had to roll. He worked in display advertising, and reporters came to find him when they needed a table or a chart built to run beside a story. He has watched every transition since from the inside: desktop publishing replacing paste-up, the web replacing the press run, digital replacing film. He regards AI as the same shape of event, the distance between the person with the idea and the finished product collapsing again, and he says the pattern holds. “The craft carries across,” he says. “The tooling is always temporary.”

In between there was a great deal of paperwork. He kept payroll tax accounts at Rockwell’s space and defense division in Seal Beach, California, while Boeing was buying it, and replaced the office’s method for updating multi-state tax tables, which involved dialing in and downloading each change by itself, with a single file pulled off the web. He ran communications and technology for the Chamber of Commerce in Cerritos, California, with two staff and an intern, a weekly bulletin, a monthly print edition, a seat at the legislative committee, and the migration of the membership list off a system nobody else could operate. He says that is where he learned business, from sitting between shop owners, executives, and elected officials and having to work out what each of them needed. Then Keaʻau, Hawaii, as full-charge bookkeeper for a disability services provider: a three-million-dollar budget, forty people on payroll, Medicaid, grant reports, and a three-month backlog he cleared in a week. His résumé files this under accounting.

From 2006 to 2018 he also wrote résumés for other people, as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer, under the name CareerCritical. His clients included IT executives and, once, a former deputy assistant director of the United States Secret Service, whose résumé presumably did not need help getting noticed. He describes résumé writing as editorial work: interview someone, find the story in what they have done, write it so a specific reader acts on it. The camera was there the whole time. His news photographs ran on KOMO, KING, KIRO, and Q13 in Seattle, and in USA Today. The city of Burien put one on the cover of its recreation guide, ten thousand copies, a dog park. Since moving to Arizona he has covered election protests, migrants crossing the border, and Jacob Chansley, the man the country knows as the QAnon Shaman, for Getty Images and Shutterstock.

He lives in Queen Creek, at the southeastern edge of the Phoenix metro, with Bella, a rescue, part Australian Koolie, a herding breed with no sheep, so she herds Aaron, mostly toward trailheads. She stays home on shoot days. The houses are not hers to herd.

He self-hosts almost everything, which he explains by saying that when you have watched platforms come and go for thirty-five years you get particular about owning your infrastructure rather than renting your business from a vendor. The server patches itself and will not reboot while a video is encoding. It waits. So does he, in someone’s bathroom, for the light.

Queen Creek, Arizona