When the Web Stopped Saving Anyone

I’ve been talking with rainygirl in Seoul, and it’s been a real pleasure.

I asked him what he thinks is going wrong with AI. He wrote:

Many engineers in Korea are also going through a dark and gloomy period.

It’s not just that AI has taken over coding; many companies are laying off developers in the name of “AI productivity” while demanding the remaining engineers take on even heavier workloads.

While massive investments are pouring into AI-focused startups, funding for traditional web service startups has virtually dried up, leaving engineers feeling confused and unsettled.

rainygirl.com

I can’t disagree with any of it.

The first part is my own story too. Now that AI can code on its own, engineers are forced to be treated as cost — and the ones who remain are handed even higher bars. The old spaces for thinking, for creativity, get written off as hopelessly out of date.

The second part hits just as hard. A lot of senior engineers were saved by Windows 95, then by getting online. We grew up believing the web would save the world — that it would open equal chances for anyone. What’s happening now is the opposite. The world is being made more unequal, racing toward a place where only a few explode upward.

Surviving as a person still matters. Knowing that, I also want to keep refusing to help build that unequal world.