Recently I had a chat with some friends who are active programmers.
Most of the conversation was the usual idle talk about AI.
I have had no work for nearly three months. Even the projects I did have were all canceled midway by the clients.
They asked me to build an Agent, and even after I delivered one based on multiple papers and leaked code, it got canceled, and I've had no work for three months now.
The only thing keeping me going is a handful of maintenance tasks from previous projects: small-dollar jobs adding minor changes to existing programs.
As working developers get pushed out of the market and people who entered development using AI join the competition, the livelihood of established freelancers is eroding.
The old freelance market didn't look at your academic credentials or background. All that mattered was whether you could actually implement something. That's why I was able to deliver to clients in many different places.
But these days, most people have been pushed aside, and because AI can do the work, nobody thinks that being able to finish something is a special talent anymore.
Just two years ago, being able to deliver a complete project end-to-end was a career credential. It was something special.
That alone was what I brought to the market, and it was how I built my life.
But now it means nothing. The one saving grace is that I've paid off all my debt.
In June, the Iran war broke out, oil prices rose, and factory expansion plans that had been scheduled were canceled, leaving my work in limbo. Since then, projects have been getting canceled one after another. Even contracts that were already signed became unnecessary and were called off.
The irony is that submitting a detailed PPT proposal is now enough to get a contract canceled. Because AI can just follow that PPT and do everything itself.
My rate was somewhere between 5 million and 6.5 million won. That was the going price for a competent programmer in the provinces who could see an entire project through to completion. I do think I had genuine skill to justify that.
Now I've lowered my rate to 3 million won and still can't land work.
Everything is shifting to in-house development, and what little does come to market is priced extremely low.
Places like Wishket don't really hire individual developers like me. They'll suspend my account just for linking to the client sites I proved myself on and my own homepage. They take a 20% commission and, in practice, only accept companies that can take on full liability.
The agencies I used to work with say they have no work for me either. Those agencies are themselves moving away from simple solution delivery toward turnkey contracts that cover everything from delivery to ongoing operations, and as an individual contractor, that kind of arrangement is very hard for me to take on.
To get a salaried job I'd have to go to Seoul. But there's essentially no chance anyone in Seoul would hire me (my experience is in full end-to-end solutions, but companies there generally prefer candidates with B2C service company backgrounds over WMS and ERP experience). And I can't afford housing in Seoul.
The main reason I stay in the provinces is that the cost of housing and basic living expenses is something I can actually manage here.
When it comes to code quality, I actually don't think the gap has been enormous since the AI era arrived.
There are issues with global consistency in large programs, but those are solvable if you have a decent amount of experience.
The problem is that when everyone's ability levels out, hiring decisions start to revolve around academic credentials and big-company pedigree.
Even without large contracts, I was making enough to get by, delivering research materials and some code validation work to labs. But now even that has completely dried up. Starting with AI subscription fees, I feel like everything is slowly tightening around me.
My twenties had no youth in them. I spent almost all of it working and studying. There was nothing good, let alone any dating.
My teens weren't good either, for that matter. I suffered severe domestic violence and had no space where I felt safe. My relationships with classmates weren't great. I was bullied at school. My parents were largely indifferent to me. As I got older, my parents grew weaker and I failed at my first startup attempt, which brought us a little closer, but I still find them hard to be around.
In your twenties, you can still pick yourself up in a new field even after failure, but from your thirties on, you have to keep stacking deliverables, even imperfect ones.
And now, in my mid-thirties, the continuity of my deliverables has finally been broken.
A long list of payments due any day now flickers in my mind. Up until last year I was earning quite a lot, but early this year I burned through all of it on things like a computer replacement and various other problems.
I failed academically, I failed at relationships, I've failed at everything. There was a time I ran a full marathon and lost weight, but I failed at dating, failed at graduate school, failed at studying.
I have never succeeded at a single thing. When I think about it, the only success record in my life seems to be the times it was tied to programming.
Whether I ever had good times since birth is always a blur to me. Programming, which I took up as a profession in my late twenties, was the only means I had to become financially independent, secure a space I could call my own, and design my life without needing anyone else's permission.
AI is replacing that part of me. Half of my programmer friends say they're going back to carpentry or welding, but I can't let go of this. How could I let go of myself?
I sit in front of the computer all day, type a few lines of source code in a daze, and then, with my thoughts stopped cold, just read books.
Should I make a game?
Is there even something I want to make?
Everything I ever wanted to make, I brought to someone, and was turned down every time.
There's no company that would invest in me. Actually, I still remember being laughed at when I brought a proposal in. They had no interest in my technology.
Living on the periphery, having no reputation in the programming industry, means your rates are low. I am a person on the periphery, and the taste I have doesn't fit the mainstream of Korean coding, nor the mainstream of development abroad.
Struggling to survive is always painful. I'm not living to be happy. It's simply that life was forced upon me somehow, and all I can do is give it my best.
Still, sometimes I think happiness is a luxury that doesn't suit me. My life has always been hanging off the cliff of depression, screaming. I'm not sure what I'm doing counts as living.
What I feel is that, as long as I don't die, life continues. Whether that is living, I'm not sure. Life goes on. Life goes on, but going on is not the same as moving forward.
For now, I'm going to try finishing at least one game. I have enough to cover my AI subscription and taxes for a month or two.
I'll probably fail, but accepting that is something I've always been used to anyway.
Marriage, relationships, academic reputation: I've acknowledged and accepted that these are things I will not obtain. But if I give up even this, the one thing I can still make, then what am I?
Nobody can abandon their own self. This is who I am.