Spent a few days in a sanctioned country.

The biggest surprise wasn’t censorship.

It was realizing how much of the modern developer stack simply stops working.

AI assistants.
Cloud services.
Developer tools.

It reminded me of something:

AI can make you faster.

But it should never become a dependency.

When the tools disappear, your engineering skills are all that’s left.

That’s one reason I love building on Bitcoin and Nostr.

In a world that’s becoming increasingly permissioned, they’re a constant reminder to build systems—and skills—you actually own.