When Everyone Has AI Superpowers

Just last year, developers argued a lot about whether a human should do the final review when AI writes the code, or whether the review should go to AI too. Now the world seems to have tipped almost entirely toward "AI builds it and AI reviews it." So I figured a similar wave would hit the non-developer world soon, and I'd been thinking we might need something to clear the bottleneck of humans reviewing AI slop documents.

Through the first half of this year and into the middle of it, that pain point clearly existed. But when I look closely at things lately, the documents AI writes are pretty good on their own. There's some awkwardness, sure, but it's at a level you can let go if you think of it as just a different writing style. Everyone writes differently to begin with, and no piece of writing satisfies everyone, so that kind of texture now feels closer to "a different style."

Either way, most of what non-developers do is work done through documents and talking, and AI is good at that now too. Surprisingly, it also reviews well without hallucinating, and it lays things out in front of you so a human can understand and make decisions. That era really seems to have arrived.

When I heard people say, "In the AI era it won't be monitors anymore. It'll be talking back and forth like in the movie "Her". Monitors, mice, and keyboards aren't the most efficient tools," I still thought you needed to look at a screen directly, track the whole picture, and see at a glance where everything is. Plus, talking all the time would make your throat hurt, so I figured typing was still the best option. Lately, though, I'm getting the feeling I was wrong about this.

It used to be that the fun part was opening several sessions and multitasking by connecting different agents myself. But look at things like Instinct, Muse, Grok Bot, and Dots these days, and they just handle everything inside one session. It feels strange at first. It works because, for example, a single Claude Code session creates several sub-agents on its own and splits up the work, remembers all your earlier requests, even talks to other sessions, and digs through your local data. It really does feel like it gets what you mean before you finish saying it. And if you connect it to channels like Slack or Discord, this AI turns into a total little sorcerer that coordinates opinions with people on my behalf and brings them together. While I'm out on a walk or asleep, feedback goes back and forth, and when I wake up the product is partly finished. That's the world unfolding right now.

That's why the future that devices like Meta's glasses are betting on finally feels real to me. The moment when AI becomes a true "personal agent" right in the middle of my field of vision seems to be coming. When it does, I won't need to stare at a laptop or monitor, and I may not even need the effort of running several sessions in parallel and straining to keep up with them. I think that's when the feeling of really holding a superpower will come, and the general public will be able to experience it easily.

Of course there will be a divide over that superpower too. Some people will dream of a life close to the myth of the "one-person unicorn" Sam Altman talked about and get extremely good at using AI. Others will feel their self-esteem wear down when faced with the fact that "AGI is coming, plenty of people use AI better than I do, and AI itself is more capable than I am." This is a bit of a tangent, but on the Korean variety show "Biseojin", the actor Lee Seo-jin once told the K-pop idol group RESCENE, "Money is everything. If you make a lot of money, happiness will come." When I chew on that, I feel it's closer to saying this: when you don't have enough money, you struggle to give yourself credit no matter what you achieve, you easily feel like someone who can't even manage the basics, and so you lose your sense of gratitude. That sense of lack stays as an emptiness in a corner of your heart. And as you get older, other assets like stamina and potential shrink, so more and more often the "final result" gets converted into money. When you don't have it, it gets harder and harder to fill that space with anything else.

AI could go the same way. If I feel like I'm losing to AI, or always feel inadequate next to people with more powerful AI and infrastructure, that lack could badly damage my self-esteem. If a lot of people end up discouraged like that, I think that alone will be a pretty big social problem. And it goes beyond jobs. In the US, values around work and how to live changed rapidly with the anti-Vietnam War protests and the spread of hippie culture. In the same way, the AI era might bring a change that flips our collective sense of "what work means" and "how to live."

...

That's what I said out loud while walking alone, thinking to myself like a monologue, and AI summarized it and wrote it up like this. It wrote it so smoothly that even I got inspired reading it. The irony, haha.

Originally published in Korean on Brunch, October 6, 2026.