I worked with Aaron on the old watchdog.net. I found his technical judgment to be consistently superior to mine, which is something that I can say of very few other people. Tim Berners-Lee said Aaron was a mentor to him, rather than the other way around. One of the core Django team said Aaron started the whole magic-removal effort, and that Django was much better as a result. Aaron was also the first person I remember to point out that Bitcoin embeds a solution to Zooko's Triangle: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko and thus the first person to propose a practical solution to secure, decentralized, human-readable names, which we'd all thought was impossible for about a decade, even Dan Kaminsky. (Nick Szabo made a proposal some years back, but nobody has attempted to build it.)

I agree that programming was not as important as organizing people for the public good to him. But I think you should take the word of programmers who worked with him: he was a first-class programmer.

I also think it's selling him a bit short to call him a "dreamer". He stopped SOPA.