Vladimir Cutkovic

Building micro-SaaS, field-ops software & AI-assisted dev workflows.
Berlin. 10+ yrs in code & leadership.
Exploring how experienced devs survive the AI shift.

[Guillaume @gxlmo]

I am 27, French, and I am tired of living on a continent that treats AI, compute, chips, crypto, datacenters, energy and nuclear power as problems to manage instead of strategic assets to build.

I do not want frontier AI to become another nationality-gated privilege. I want powerful AI models to remain generally available to builders, researchers, engineers and founders. But what happened with Anthropic’s Fable/Mythos models proves that this cannot be taken for granted: once frontier AI becomes a national-security asset, access can be restricted by citizenship or nationality.

The problem is that Europe has failed to build its own equivalent. We are not in the frontier AI race at the level of the U.S. or China. We do not have the same hyperscale cloud stack, the same compute capacity, the same capital depth, the same energy strategy, the same chip ecosystem, or the same frontier-model ecosystem. And because AI progress compounds through compute, talent, chips, energy, data and capital, falling behind is not linear. Once the gap is deep enough, you do not catch up at the same pace.

Europe spent decades regulating, moralizing, delaying and underbuilding the foundations of technological power. Cloud was missed. Crypto was treated primarily as a criminal-risk category before Europe built anything globally dominant in it. Datacenters are slowed by permitting, grid and energy constraints. Nuclear power was politically weakened or delayed across much of the continent just when abundant electricity became essential. AI is now being regulated before Europe has even produced a true top-tier frontier lab/model (no, MistralAI isn't a real competitor, for me, even Kyutai did more innovation/progress in the AI space than MistralAI).

Our leaders now talk about "sovereign AI", "AI factories", "gigafactories", and "strategic autonomy", but this language came far too late. You cannot regulate your way into technological sovereignty. You cannot paperwork your way into compute. You cannot build frontier AI without massive power, massive datacenters, massive capital, elite talent, advanced chips and a political culture that actually wants builders to move fast.

Europe still has talent. France still has engineers, mathematicians, scientists and founders. But the system around them is broken. The incentives are wrong. The mindset is wrong. Every mainstream political camp in France and Europe seems to have the same reflex: regulate first, tax first, restrict first, moralize first, build later.

ASML is the exception that proves the rule. It is one of the only truly strategic European chokepoints in the global compute stack. But one Dutch lithography champion cannot carry an entire continent that failed to build the rest of the stack: frontier AI labs, hyperscale cloud, Nvidia-class accelerators, TSMC-class fabs, massive datacenter capacity, cheap abundant energy and deep capital markets.

I did not vote for 20+ years of anti-growth, anti-compute, anti-nuclear, anti-crypto and anti-industrial policy. I was a kid. But my generation is supposed to live with the consequences: less access, less sovereignty, less capital, less compute, less ambition and a future where the most important technologies are built and can only be used somewhere else.

That is the part I cannot accept.

I do not want to spend my adult life asking permission to use technologies my continent was too slow, too afraid or too complacent to build.

I do not want European builders to become tenants in someone else’s technological empire (as it's already the case).

And I do not want "sovereignty" to mean nothing more than regulating foreign systems after failing to create our own like they're doing right now with cloud computing.

Either Europe becomes a builder civilization again, or the next generation of Europeans will inherit a beautifully regulated dependency that slow or even stop us.

For now, Europe still talks like history will wait...

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

@GenAI_is_real Good! I am not alone! Some existential crisis is hitting me for a while. I can't say I am not panicking because things are moving way faster than I can follow, let alone figure out what is the way forward. Taking a pause to think about it sounds like a sane advice!

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

Shipping with AI feels intoxicating.

The velocity is unreal.

Two weeks ago I hacked a deployment config to unblock something.

It worked.

I forgot to push it to main.

Teammates later hit issues. They debugged. Investigated. Lost time.

Then I had the realization:
It was me.

The scary part isn’t the mistake.

It’s how easy it was to forget.

That same day we shipped features, refactors, decisions, at AI speed.

Everything felt lightweight.

But the impact wasn’t lightweight.

AI reduces execution effort.
It does not reduce system risk.

We’re making more decisions per day than we can cognitively digest.

We don’t need less velocity.

We need new discipline for AI-era development

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

AI can generate features in minutes.
But keeping code and design aligned in fast-moving teams, without a designer on board is still messy.

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

@gothburz This somehow made me laugh and cry at the same time! I am both super excited about what is possible now and extremely scared where all of this is heading to. Definitely made my day!

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

Back to basics!
Wrote super detailed user stories and the agent produced a workable solution.
I know PRDs and SRS inside out, but for small scopes, structured stories beat heavyweight specs when reasoning with AI.

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

Can't wait for that moment, to spin up couple of agents in the cloud, sit back and enjoy, while acting as an orchestrator, feeding agents with key context while they produce solutions at a staggering speed. What a time to be a builder!
https://t.co/4IUNvGMp58

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

Just started experimenting with #ClaudeCode.

I’ve been very “code-first” (and Cursor-heavy), so this already feels like a mental shift. Less typing, more steering.

Early days — curious to see how this changes my workflow.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Serbian students have decided that enough is enough. Now they need to give political expression to what comes next. It will take courage and a clarity of purpose. I believe they have both. Let them show us the way forward https://t.co/j4OUUypipS

[I Am Devloper @iamdevloper]

when a recruiter wants to talk to you about a role with a startup that's "changing the world"

[not just pixels @getifyX]

"I rewrote the app using hooks instead of....."

"Just stop. You're fired."

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

HTTP Toolkit looks awesome! New open-source tool to intercept, debug & build with HTTP. Download it now at https://t.co/Gnq6wTGoEo #httptoolkit

[Chris Heilmann codepo8.bsky.social @codepo8]

2020 is End of Life for Flash, just saying... There is no way browsers will keep supporting it. All Line-of-business apps based on Flex will stop working and all content delivered through Flash gone.

[DHH @dhh]

This is such a cartoonish version of an abusing boss that you almost question whether it's real. But yep, it's real. Collective punishment. Arbitrary goals. Fucking KPIs my ass.

[Chris Heilmann codepo8.bsky.social @codepo8]

#10YearChallenge

[Rohit @romiem]

Which of these books do you own?

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

“Top JavaScript Frameworks and Topics to Learn in 2019” by Eric Elliott https://t.co/9kINc9qCW7

[Nicholas C. Zakas @slicknet]

I never considered myself a great programmer. Solidly above average for sure, but not great. I attribute my career success to two things:

1. Being a good communicator.

2. Caring about details.

It’s amazing how far these two skills can get you.

[Jeff Atwood @codinghorror]

Being "smart" isn't a reliable path to success. But you know what is? Becoming borderline obsessive about one thing and spending a ridiculous amount of time learning about and practicing that thing, such that you get super good at it.

[Vladimir Cutkovic @vladamon]

"The Art of Humanizing Pull Requests (PR’s)" by @kulkarniankita9 https://t.co/TrNnDGAVlP