aaron levin
i build for enterprises, small businesses, and myself. i love startups and have spent my career with them (10+ years). i am a social butterfly and love balancing client-time with heads-down time in the weeds of a project.
i've done projects in healthcare, media, insurance, commercial & consumer real estate. i've done large-scale document extraction and evals, customer support bots, coding agents, and a bunch of internal process automations.
in my free time i've enjoyed side projects, learning languages, self-teaching guitar, and distance running. my most insane opinion is that the tacobell 50k was easier than a normal marathon.
for business inquiries please reach out to aaron@aaronideas.com
projects
- philosophers, learning tools · oct 2026: the big ideas of 61 philosophers, thales to foucault. site repo
- chess vision, learning tools · oct 2026: find and name every square on a chessboard, timed. repo
- taco bell 50k, for friends & guests · oct 2026: $5 picked a song in my ears for 31 miles of taco bells. site
- computer use w/ ocr + jev, ai & agents · sep 2026: computer use for $0.0002 a step, no screenshots to a big model. repo
- music mania, party games · sep 2026: the tv plays a song, everyone races to name it. site repo
- opencooked, party games · sep 2026: overcooked on the tv, with every phone as a controller. site repo
- codecal, ai & agents · aug 2026: see how effectively you use coding agents. repo
- interpretable, learning tools · aug 2026: mech interp course for myself from my fav papers. site repo
- mental math trainer, learning tools · aug 2026: timed drills that teach you the trick when you miss one. repo
- airbnb guest guide, for friends & guests · jul 2026: for my airbnb guests. proudly top 5% in denver. site
- gazelle, learning tools · jul 2026: speed-reading trainer via webcam gaze detection. repo
- dillow, party games · jun 2026: guess house prices. site
- spoken-text, ai & agents · may 2026: wrap any text in a react component to hear it read aloud. site repo
- potlucky, for friends & guests · mar 2026: plan a potluck with friends, allergies included. site
- agent madness, ai & agents · mar 2026: march madness for agents. site repo
- avalon online, party games · jan 2026: great social deception game facilitator. site
- whomst.info, for friends & guests · jan 2022: find an available domain without leaving imessage. site
- cornhole fiesta, hardware & school · fall 2018: automatic cornhole scoring, by computer vision. repo
- wisc-v CPU, hardware & school · fall 2018: a pipelined processor built from scratch in verilog. repo
- roomate, hardware & school · fall 2017: an ios app for roommates: chores, expenses, events. repo
- embedded DDR, hardware & school · spring 2017: your favorite dancing game, but on a circuit board. repo
- handwritten digit recognizer, hardware & school · summer 2016: a neural net in java that reads handwritten digits. repo
career
- vellum, founding fde/ai engineer · 2024 - present: coding agent & personal assistant harnesses. vellum.ai
- fiveable, head of engineering · 2019 - 2024: grew 3k to 1m+ MAU as CTO. fiveable.me
- id tech, lead instructor · summer 2019: oversaw 16 students and 2 instructors, taught robotics. idtech.com
- self-employed, freelance engineer/tutor · 2019: cut a 2-day manual process down to under 20 seconds.
- intuit, software engineer intern · 2018: applied for 2 patents while moving identity onto aws. intuit.com
- ibm watson health, cognitive software developer · 2017: diabetes chatbot mvp for a multi-million dollar bid. ibm.com
- swopshop, co-founder / cto · 2017 - 2018: won $5,000 placing 3rd of 30+ teams at startup competition.
- uw–madison, student · 2014 - 2018: double major in computer engineering and computer science. undergraduate projects lab, coordinator, 2017 - 2018: a space in the lobby of the computer science building where students hang out, study and team up on side projects. i held office hours 2+ hours a week, often 10+ (i loved it), for course planning, internship advice and side-project help. undergraduate learning center, tutor, 2016 - 2018: free peer tutoring for engineering students, from data structures to linear algebra. i led weekly 3-hour drop-ins with dozens of students at once, plus 1-on-1s. empathy and the socratic method were my best tools, and they've helped me well beyond tutoring. madhacks, sponsor liaison, 2017 - 2018: uw–madison's student-run hackathon, chartered by major league hacking. on the exec board, one other organizer and i raised $29,000 from dozens of sponsors. wisc.edu
reading
- if anyone builds it, everyone dies, eliezer yudkowsky & nate soares · read dec 2025: superintelligence kills us by default, not by malice.
- lean in, sheryl sandberg · read may 2024: women, ambition, and what holds leadership back.
- no rules rules, reed hastings · read may 2024: netflix ran on radical transparency and no controls.
- white like me, tim wise · read may 2024: white privilege in america, and the systems that keep it.
- men explain things to me, rebecca solnit · read may 2024: the essays that coined mansplaining, on being silenced.
- the last lecture, randy pausch · read mar 2024: on chasing childhood dreams in the face of mortality.
- evolution of a corporate idealist, christine bader · read feb 2023: pushing social impact from inside a corporation.
- let my people go surfing, yvon chouinard · read nov 2022: patagonia put the planet first and still succeeded.
- extreme ownership, jocko willink · read apr 2022: navy seal leadership: own everything in your world.
- how to win friends & influence people, dale carnegie · read mar 2022: take genuine interest in people, and never criticize.
- persist, elizabeth warren · read mar 2022: fighting for change against systemic obstacles.
- atomic habits, james clear · read mar 2022: 1% better daily, by stacking habits onto old ones.
- shoe dog, phil knight · read nov 2021: nike built from nothing, near-death moments and all.
- zero to one, peter thiel · read oct 2021: create something new instead of competing for a market.
- thinking backwards, rob van haastrecht · read aug 2021: solve problems by starting from the outcome you want.
- escaping the build trap, melissa perri · read aug 2021: shipping features is not the same as solving problems.
- a brief history of time, stephen hawking · read aug 2021: cosmology made legible: the universe, time, our place.
- outliers, malcolm gladwell · read aug 2021: success is 10,000 hours plus circumstance, not talent.
- the subtle art of not giving a f*ck, mark manson · read aug 2021: choose what to care about; the shock value wears thin.
- freakonomics, steven d. levitt · read aug 2021: economics explains the strangest human behavior.
- thinking, fast and slow, daniel kahneman · read aug 2021: two systems think for you: fast intuition, slow reason.