Ex-big-tech AI engineer in China freelances by day, delivers food by night as AI crushes rates
Hesamation · x · 2026-10-06
Hesamation shares the story of "Jared", a 28-yearformer big-tech AI engineer in China who quit 996 to freelance. Working from an illegal rooftop shack by day and delivering food 6-10pm for $15/night just to cover rent, he watches AI make code so cheap that his rates keep dropping — "it literally takes a single prompt" — yet says "there's no going back." He even built ESP32 cooling for his PC while his own room relies on a water sprayer. A stark illustration of how AI coding tools are squeezing low-end freelance developer income.
More from AGI Musings
- LLMs poisoned the online Q&A paradigm — and are now the new Q&A paradigm — max_paperclips · 2026-10-06
- Designer's Steve Jobs tribute: from hacking a beige PC into a Mac to lamenting tech's refinement loop — ryolu_ · 2026-10-06
- Functionalists point to MoE vs dense models to argue brain compute debate — JoshPurtell · 2026-10-06
- Rob LeClerc backs the case that AI could let humanity retake bigger risks thoughtfully — robleclerc · 2026-10-06
- iamtrask boosts token-attribution idea to fix enterprise AI's incentive misalignment — iamtrask · 2026-10-06
- AI systems are not p-zombies in the philosophical sense, explains Robert Long — rgblong · 2026-10-06