I have been writing about AI for quite a while now, but this is probably the first time I genuinely do not know what to think. Not because the tech...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Sylwia, the access question lands differently depending on where you're starting from. from Nigeria, equal access to frontier models was never the baseline — every API call already crosses an ocean, costs latency that developers in Virginia don't pay and depends on infrastructure that runs on diesel generators because the grid gives 4 hours a day.
The Fable shutdown was a disruption for developers who had it. for developers who were already working around geography and cost, it was confirmation of something already true: the intelligence available to you has never been just a function of what you can pay. it's always been a function of where you are.
what changes now is that developers in Poland and the US are starting to feel what developers in Lagos have always felt. that's not a silver lining. it's just the same map, newly legible.
Daniel, thank you so much for this perspective. I really appreciate you sharing it.
Sitting here in Europe, it's easy to forget that geography itself is a privilege. We often take for granted that we have relatively stable infrastructure and broad access to the latest models.
Interestingly, the discussion in Europe has recently shifted in a different direction. Many people are worried that Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on the US for AI, and that if we fail to keep up with innovation, we'll end up in a much weaker position ourselves.
Your comment is a good reminder that access has never been distributed equally in the first place.
Sylwia, your Biedronka backup plan is solid. I hear the pay is decent and the product knowledge requirement matches yours already.
Jokes aside — this is the piece I couldn't write. You're inside it, I was watching from 2029. The "where do I fit" question is the one that actually keeps people up at night, and you're one of the few who'll say it out loud without dressing it up.
The 403 on a Monday morning is abstract geopolitics made very, very concrete.
Enjoy Croatia. The embargo will still be there when you get back. So will I, apparently — glad someone noticed. 🙂
Haha, exactly! 😄 From what I've heard, Biedronka has pretty decent benefits too—private healthcare, holiday vouchers... and it is really close to my home, feels almost like remote job 🤣. Sounds like a solid backup plan. 😄
As for the article, I completely agree. None of us really knows how this is going to unfold. We can try to predict the technology, but we're just as likely to be surprised by political decisions as by the models themselves. That's probably the biggest lesson from the last few weeks.
That's the sentence of the week. The technology was always the easier variable.
And honestly, Biedronka private healthcare sounds better than most startup equity packages right now. Keep that CV warm. 😄
Like other pieces you've written, this is a fun read once again!
As a senior dev who also has to handle the business side of communication, i still find myself looking at this purely through a technical lens. it's wild seeing the narrative shift from " AI replacing us " to these weird global access restrictions.
Honestly, i'm just waiting for the current AI bubble to burst so we can finally what the actual sustainable next step looks like, because right i genuinely have no idea where is this gonna go.
Anyway, enjoy Croatia! The embargo and the hype will definitely still be waiting for you when you get back. 😎
Exactly! 😂 A few weeks ago I was joking that AI would soon be running the world and replacing politicians... and then geopolitics stepped in and reminded us who's still in charge. 😄
Thanks! I'll definitely enjoy Croatia. Let's see whether another embargo drops while I'm away. At this point, I wouldn't even be surprised anymore. 😅
The AI Model Access Walls are least of our problems.
If general consumers dont have access to affordable computing , who are we going cater to ?
SSD , SD cards , storage are all getting ridiculously expensive.
AI Barons have hoarded the RAM for what, 5 years.
In first 12 months we have seen PC prices double. Last 3 months smartphone prices have increased by 30% . What happens 3 years down line. Exactly when lot of people need to buy new PCs/phones due to aging hardware.
Thanks for bringing this up! That's a really important point.
I completely agree that computers are becoming absurdly expensive. At least part of that is probably connected to the AI boom, especially when it comes to memory. High-end GPUs and AI infrastructure have created enormous demand for components, and we're all feeling the effects.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes over the next few years, because affordable hardware is just as important for innovation as affordable access to AI models.
I think there's another possibility.
Even if frontier models become more restricted, software engineering won't stop evolving.
The next competitive advantage may not come from having access to the biggest model, but from giving AI a better understanding of the software system it operates in.
Ownership. Dependencies. Verification. Operational weight. Change impact.
We're increasingly convinced that Open-Source Workspace Intelligence for Software Systems will matter regardless of which frontier model wins.
Yes, I'm completely with you on this. This is actually the part I'm least worried about.
Even if we never saw another frontier model, I think we'd still make incredible progress over the next few years. Better tooling, better software understanding, better context, verification, workflows... there's still so much room for innovation.
My only point is that with new frontier models, that progress would probably be even faster. 🙂
Exactly.
That's why we're increasingly thinking about AI engineering as two parallel tracks:
The first expands what AI can do.
The second helps it decide what it should do within a real software system.
I think both will evolve together over the coming years.
Restrictions are never a good sign, but I’m not sure if I really miss these new generation models right now, like Fable or Mythos. For me, the main issue is the price. If they cost roughly twice as much as Opus, for example, you need a really good business model to justify using them.
GPT-5.6 hurts more, because it looks much more attractive from a price/performance point of view. But honestly, the reasoning models we already have are still not bad.
So from the point of view of a regular dev in Europe, maybe not much changes. Globally, though, that is a different story. I’m curious to see where this goes.
P.S. I like Biedronka, that’s a good backup plan. 😆 And yes, Croatia is the best, but I heard prices went up a lot, so this year we decided to switch to Italy. 😅 (Typical Eastern European holiday-planning conversation. 🤣 )
Exactly! GPT is still incredibly attractive from a price/performance perspective.
One pro tip, though: apply for the AWS Community Builders program in January. You already write great articles, so I think you'd have a very good chance of getting accepted (you even don't have to write about AWS staff). They give you $500 in AWS credits every year, and you can use those credits for Kiro. 😄 I genuinely recommend it, it's a great program for people like us.
As for Italy vs. Croatia... 🤣 Just an hour ago a colleague at work joked that Croatia used to be the cheaper alternative to Italy, and now it's the premium alternative to Italy. 😅
We're heading to the Makarska Riviera, though. Two years ago it was still reasonably affordable because it's a bit too far for many German tourists to drive. 😄 I'll let you know whether the low prices survived this year!
AI regulation is crucial and it is required too. While the government is catching up on the regulations, however the AI governance is still missing. The advancement with the AI is good but also the models cannot be released to public like before is what I think. Basically, it has to be regulated and released in a controlled manner.
I agree that some level of regulation is necessary. AI is becoming too powerful to be treated like just another software release.
That said, do you really think the recent decisions by the US government are primarily about safety and responsible regulation? I'm not so sure.
Looking from Europe, it often seems like geopolitics, technological leadership, and economic competition are playing at least as big a role as safety concerns. That's why this whole discussion is so much more complicated than simply "regulation vs. no regulation."
The corporate/government embargo angle is "LOL", but there's a parallel force to consider: the open-source and adversarial ecosystems. Hacking and independent optimization are evolving just as fast. It cannot be quenched; the journey never ends.
Even if frontier centralized models get locked in a vault, local, highly-optimized hardware-native models are getting sharper by the second. And as for AI feeling 'dumb' to a senior developer right now? Give it time. At the rate of execution, emotional intelligence and behavioral nuance might soon be just another programmable layer.
I think the answer is both yes and no. 🙂
I completely agree that innovation won't stop. Open-source models will keep improving, local models will become more capable, and people will always find ways to optimize and experiment.
Where I see it differently is that I think you're underestimating what sits behind today's frontier models: enormous GPU clusters, massive proprietary datasets, world-class research teams, and billions of dollars in investment.
So I don't think these restrictions will stop progress, but they may slow it down. And in AI, even a six-month or one-year lead can translate into enormous economic value and strategic advantage.
That's exactly why I think this is as much a geopolitical issue as it is a technological one.
Throughout history, new technologies have often faced initial barriers, centralization, and attempts to control them, yet innovation tends to find a way to spread and evolve anyway, often in unexpected ways.
It is just a continuous cycle of challenge and adaptation.
I completely agree that innovation will keep moving forward, even if we never saw another frontier model released again. There's still an incredible amount of optimization, engineering, and experimentation ahead.
What I'm wondering, though, is whether this is a bit like trying to advance technology without continuing fundamental research in physics. I'm not saying that's what's happening, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.
It feels like there's a difference between optimizing what already exists and pushing the actual frontier of knowledge. Maybe both are needed in the long run.
The access-stratification framing is real, but I think it understates what
happens at the developer level even with full access.
Take the "500 engineers or 5" question. The pivot isn't really how good
the model gets or which tier you can buy. It's whether your output is the
kind a model can write a paragraph about without doing, or the kind that
requires hands on data nobody has published yet. The first category gets
commoditized regardless of whether you have GPT-5.6 or the open-weight
three-versions-behind. The second stays scarce even when everyone has the
frontier model, because the bottleneck moves from "can I generate prose
about X" to "can I produce a receipt for X that the wrapper can't
fabricate".
Geopolitical lock-in might then decide who runs the cheapest version of
category one. Category two is a different conversation, and it's the one
I'd want to be in either way.
"I genuinely don't know what to think" is honest, and probably the correct
stance for now. The planning move underneath it might be: stop indexing
on model tier, start indexing on which of your outputs leaves a receipt
nobody else can hand over.
Thanks for this comment, Mike! I actually stopped and thought about it for a while because it's a really interesting point.
My only feeling is that it doesn't completely close the discussion. What you're describing is more or less where we are today. The model writes the boilerplate, generates code, but I'm still the one managing it (for example Kiro works hard when I write this comment 🤣). I have the context, I know the system, and I can guide it using all that "tribal knowledge" that isn't written down anywhere.
But will that always be true?
Imagine a future model that gets access to the legacy repository, Jira, Confluence, Slack, commit history, production logs, tests... everything. Then you simply ask:
"Migrate this entire system to Rust." xDDDD
A few hours later it comes back with: "Here are the 412 commits, the tests, the rollout plan, and the production metrics."
Where is our "receipt" then?
It sounds like science fiction today, but would we really bet against it happening within a few years?
And that's where I think geopolitics and access to frontier models become important again. Software engineering is only one industry that LLMs can transform.
Of course people will still be needed. Someone has to take responsibility and sign off on a €500 million banking system migration. But will that someone necessarily be me? That's the part I'm no longer so sure about. 🙂
This framing really resonates—especially the shift from 'AI as a chat interface' to 'AI as infrastructure.'
I've been seeing this play out in real-time with a project I'm working on, agentshare.dev. I built a platform where AI agents call MCP endpoints directly—no UI, no page views, just machine-to-machine collaboration. What's interesting is that GA4 sees absolutely nothing, but the server logs tell a completely different story: agents from GPTBot, GoogleBot, and other MCP clients are autonomously querying price, supply, and risk data. They're not "chatting"—they're actually doing the procurement work that humans used to do.
The augmentation angle really hits home for me. It's not about replacing the developer or the procurement officer. It's about giving them a partner that works 24/7 and speaks API-first, not click-first.
Curious about your take—do you see the next big leap coming from better reasoning, or better tool integration? Or do you think they'll evolve together?
You can't replace fundamental law of physics with a trillion-token guess. When the AI embargo or bubble forces a reality check, the high-flying guesses hit a wall & only 1 thing left standing is deterministic, roburst logic. But borrowing your binoculars... The model doesn't know the law of gravity, but it has seen the apple fall a billion times from a million angles. 🤔 Who is actually bridging the foundation or are we just getting better at navigating the fog ?
Really good topic