About

I'm Tom Küstner, a software developer based in Berlin with 27 years of experience in web development, Linux, and enterprise-level web content management systems (WCMS).

I started building for the web at a time when HTML was still written by hand in text editors and CSS was a promise, not a given.

For many years I worked primarily in the LAMP stack. In 2008 I co-developed the content management system synType CMS together with MindArry GbR.

Today I work with a variety of frameworks, platform-agnostic, at the intersection of software development and AI-assisted methodology. What drives me is not just the question of whether something works, but how it comes into being, and whether the process is reproducible, documentable, and honest.

What I do

I build web applications with modern stacks (SvelteKit, React, TypeScript), run my own infrastructure on Linux/Docker, and spend a lot of time with the question of how AI assistance actually changes software development, beyond marketing demos. My projects are both products and research vehicles: each one delivers working software and documented insights about the process.

What I think about

Spec-driven development with LLMs. The methodology question behind the prompt. Constraint-induced methodology development: the phenomenon that the very limitations of AI tools force lasting, better work habits. Software quality in an era where code is generated faster than it is understood. And the conviction that methodology can be a standalone result, not just a byproduct.