We Can't Beat AI, So We Chose Fun

In March I wrote a piece called "Claude Blue Is Spreading Across Silicon Valley." It was about how Claude was taking over developers' work at a frightening pace and sending Silicon Valley engineers into a deep funk. A few days ago I got on the phone with an older friend I know from my book club. He's a developer at a big Korean tech company, and what he told me lined up so closely with that piece that I listened far more intently than usual.

His story didn't stop at depression, though. It went on to his own answer to a harder question: once you accept that you can't beat AI, what do you do next? It stayed with me long after we hung up, so I'm writing it down.

Books don't make me curious anymore

We were talking about the book club when he said he'd been having trouble reading lately, and that, to his own surprise, he thought AI was the reason.

I used to love what I got out of finishing a book, just the feeling of it. These days everything goes to AI, so there's not much left in a book that I'm curious about.

So instead of books you read for information, he's choosing ones where the reading itself is the fun, like classic novels and essays. Right now he's wrestling with "One Hundred Years of Solitude". The family tree is so tangled and the names so hard that every time he opens it he starts over from the beginning. He keeps at it because he feels his reading comprehension has slipped badly. Every line is a challenge, but while he reads he keeps imagining things, and he says there aren't many other places these days where he gets to use his imagination. For something lighter, he's reading "Tuesdays with Morrie".

I recently enjoyed a book called "Sayno's Teachings" (a Korean bestseller by an anonymous self-made businessman who writes as "Sayno"), and looking back, I liked it for the same reason he described. Instead of organizing information from the outside world, it's one person's very subjective thinking, so reading it feels closer to reading someone's blog. Books about methods, on the other hand, go stale fast at today's pace. As he put it, we've reached the point where we have to rethink which books are worth reading in the first place.

I haven't written my own code in over a year

When I asked how work was going, he said it didn't feel the way it used to. He used to love the deep focus of building things himself, and now he barely gets that time.

I haven't written my own code in over a year. I hand everything off, and all that's left for me is giving direction.

His output is far higher than before. The problem is that it doesn't turn cleanly into business results. I asked why higher productivity from AI wasn't showing up as revenue, and whether it was because everyone had leveled up at the same time. He answered with a question of his own:

Maybe business was just always hard?

Plenty of people built things before, too, and the ones that survived were lucky or happened to fit the market. Now there are far more attempts, but the rule is the same as ever: if what you make doesn't offer value the market wants, it fails. He thinks ordinary SaaS companies will have a particularly hard time. You used to log your meals in a diet app and get advice. Now you keep a ChatGPT window open and type, "I ate this today, what should I do next?" You can take the conversation anywhere, outside whatever rules the app set, and that's hard to compete with. I can't think of a simpler explanation for why people have started talking about the "SaaSpocalypse."

They can't fire, so they don't hire

The heaviest thing he brought up was jobs. The US went through one big wave of layoffs as AI came in, but Korea can't do that because its labor market is so rigid. Companies can't skip AI either, so they pay a sizable AI bill for every employee. The headcount stays the same and the extra cost keeps going out, so from the company's side it's like adding one more employee perk.

So of course they stop hiring new grads. It's obvious. Why would they add more cost?

At smaller companies, he said, the shift has already started. Instead of separate backend, frontend and data engineers, one "product engineer" handles planning and operations too. He expects that even big companies will eventually reach a point where paying severance and a buyout package all at once makes more sense than carrying people indefinitely. He doesn't know when, but each of these things lands on him as pressure. If there were a full-time contract where you worked two days a week for a matching salary, he said, both companies and workers could catch their breath. Right now that option doesn't exist at all.

During the call he mentioned an interview that Rhee Chang-yong, the former governor of the Bank of Korea, gave on Syuka World, one of Korea's most popular economics YouTube channels. When I looked it up later, a lot of it overlapped with what my friend had said. Rhee said the claim that AI is wiping out jobs for young people is half right and half wrong. Recent graduates are the ones who use AI best, so if companies could restructure freely, cutting middle managers and hiring more young people would be the productive move. He split the labor market into insiders, who already have good jobs and the protection of the system, and outsiders, who are trying to get in or don't have permanent jobs. In his view, the current system leans much too far toward protecting insiders.

But Korea can't do that. Pay is tied to seniority, so you can't freely shrink an organization or lay people off. So what ends up happening? You hire fewer young people.

He also said that the young people who do manage to get hired earn little while teaching AI to their bosses, and then it's the boss who takes the results in to present to the governor, so resentment is bound to build. He pointed to the time Korea raised the retirement age while leaving the pay structure alone: youth hiring fell, and marriage and birth rates dropped along with it. His fix sounded a lot like my friend's. Even if the retirement age goes up, pay has to be adjustable, and there should be a flexible system where people come in only two or three days a week and are paid to match. A developer at a big company on a phone call and a former central bank governor on YouTube were pointing at the same place.

The video runs almost two hours. The labor market discussion starts around 1:12, the AI discussion around 1:24, and the part about the semiconductor experts about five minutes in.

I hope my pessimism is wrong

I asked whether these changes excited him at all, or whether he figured that since everyone's in the same boat, we'd all find a way through somehow. He said it's true there's no real alternative, and when he thinks about it for too long it can feel bleak. What steadies him is that he doesn't think the Korean labor market will change that suddenly, plus a story about semiconductors from the same interview. A little over a year earlier, when Samsung Electronics was struggling, Rhee said he spent a month meeting about 20 Korean chip experts and asking them what would happen next.

Not one of them told me a supercycle like this was coming.

Now the same people say the chip supercycle will last ten years, so Rhee said he isn't sure whether to trust the experts. My friend took that the other way: if nobody saw this boom coming, then today's pessimism about AI wiping out jobs could be wrong too. In the same interview, Rhee said that new technology can cut jobs in the short term but can also create new kinds of work, so it's hard to say for certain that AI will reduce the demand for labor.

I hope the way I'm reading things turns out to be wrong. I'd like the answer to be "nobody knows what'll happen."

Tech companies may not be the only answer

He mentors job seekers, and jobs are so hard to get now that most of his mentees are 27 or 28 and putting off graduation just to hang on. Recently, though, one mentee interviewed at a major accounting firm. The firm has stopped hiring accountants the way it used to and has started hiring in-house developers to move the whole company onto AI. People he knows are also getting calls from global consulting firms offering them roles as AX (AI transformation) consultants.

Building a proper internal system used to take at least three teams, including an app team and a server team. Now one small engineering team can build quite a lot. That makes it far less of a burden for a place like an accounting firm to keep its own development team, and it made him think the IT industry might not be the only answer anymore.

I'd been skeptical about how long AX work will last. Helping another company become AI-native is a lot like teaching at a hagwon, one of Korea's private cram schools: once the student does well and graduates, the job is done. A hagwon keeps getting new students, but the number of companies is fixed. He said we'll have to wait and see, but in-house teams don't stop at bringing AI in. They can produce things that used to be out of reach, so the work might last longer than I think.

His coworkers were each working out their own exit. One person's father does interior renovation, so they're slowly learning the trade. Another loves wine so much that they're looking into importing it or growing grapes in Korea. The conversation has moved toward switching careers entirely, into areas that are hard for AI. In the end, he said, for now you have to hold on to your job. I told him it's one or the other: hold on to your job, or if you're going to leave, do it properly.

When an engineer turns optimist

He said that as an engineer he'd always leaned negative on this kind of talk. If he imagined building something like self-driving himself, his first thought was that it would never work, and he saw serious ethical problems too. Now it actually works, and he's gradually becoming an optimist. Robots that do housework are now within sight, and he's dying to know whether something that leaps past all of this will come next. Then he asked if I wasn't curious what our kids would be doing in that future. I tried, but I couldn't picture it, so instead of answering I just sighed.

Rhee said that although he lived abroad for many years, he thinks no children anywhere are as unhappy as Korea's. Someone has to stop the competition, he said, that starts with English academies in kindergarten and lines kids up by a single test score. When I think about how the jobs waiting at the end of that competition are the first ones shaking now, my sigh gets longer.

The last luxury left to humans

Since AI came in, my friend said, his days have less deep focus and more frantic time keeping ten sessions running at once. That has its own appeal, but maybe because of it, he goes out of his way to find things that are fun just to do, even if they have no point. He plays games on his Nintendo Switch at home. If you used to love drawing, you draw again. AI would draw far better, but the act of drawing is interesting in itself. I asked if that was the last luxury we have left as humans.

If someone had said this before, you'd say, that's just a hobby. Now I don't know. Hobbies are all we get to enjoy. AI does everything, and I can't beat it. So I just have to do what's fun for me.

He said that when Lee Sedol, the Go champion who lost to Google DeepMind's AlphaGo in 2016, announced he was retiring because of AI, he didn't really understand what that felt like. Working as a developer, he's come to feel it secondhand. Mathematicians are watching AI crack open problems, lawyers have it even worse, and doctors already use AI a lot.

Everyone who made a living by taking some knowledge base, feeding in inputs and running a model to get outputs is getting wrecked by AI. We should've done it the other way around. Man, I should've just gone into interiors.

People at the very top of knowledge work weren't much different. Rhee was asked what he meant when he once said, "AI is advancing so fast, I'm glad I don't have long left to live." He admitted that in his late sixties it's very hard to learn new things. Policymakers need to understand it, so he tries Claude every time a new AI comes out, but his stamina can't keep up, and so he thinks the people in charge of policy need to get much younger.

Cut out what you hate, one by one

At the end of the interview, young viewers asked Rhee what they should do from here. He answered:

Do what you love. Forget money, forget prestige, do what you truly love. If you're not sure what you love, you do know what you hate. Cut out the things you hate, one at a time.

Early in the interview there's a story about Syuka, the channel's host, sitting in on exactly one hour of Rhee's class twenty years ago and walking out, because on the first day Rhee told anyone who didn't plan to study hard to leave right then. Rhee said that if Syuka had just studied hard he would have ended up in law school, and that he's proud of what Syuka does now. If he ever teaches again, he said, he'll change the speech: people who want to have fun together and people who want to understand the world can stay, and people who only want to study should leave.

Asked how he handles stress, he said he quietly reads, alone, the books he never had time for. That's not so different from my friend working through "One Hundred Years of Solitude" line by line. When I wrote "Claude Blue," what I recorded was depression. On this call I heard what comes after it. People who have accepted that they can't win are cutting out what they hate, one thing at a time, and looking for what's fun just to do. At the next book club, the first thing I'm going to ask is whether he finished "One Hundred Years of Solitude".

Originally published in Korean on Brunch, October 14, 2026.