Not a software engineer. For 30 years, tried to learn to code—dyslexic hands and ADHD kept my fingers two words behind my mind. Became a software architect instead. Built startups. Hired 300+ developers on oDesk/Upwork over 2 decades. 80,000 billed hours. Learned from PRs and screenshots, watching developers from CERN, NASA, and Microsoft build what these hands couldn't.
2016, tried to invent agentic AI. Lost millions. Lost friends. Lost everything. Last startup, Findy—Perplexity's search intelligence combined with Scale AI's data labeling, powered by public typeahead transformers—years before Perplexity existed. Lost everything again.
August 2024, started over. Claude Dev became Cline, then Cursor, then Roo. Forked Kilo, built an AI OS, made a fucking mess. But 25 billion tokens later, figured out the gaps in context. Testing Amazon's Kiro—saw the potential, but the mistakes led to spec-kit. Toolkit was born.
Every line of code written by AI. Built in Claude Code in the terminal—no IDE required. Alpha, but already production-capable.
49 now. Living at mom and dad's. Licensing toolkit to build a snowboard factory in the mountains. Make boards with friends. Live the dream that's been 30 years in the making.
If this helps you build your dreams, you just helped me live mine.
Never fucking quit.
Thanks to Tom Latzo, Fredrick Karlsson, Serge Gulin, and Vladimir Glafirov for teaching me what I couldn't learn on my own.
Aaron Rosenthal
aka roseyballs