There is a moment in the BBC’s recent feature on China’s AI agent boom that I can’t stop thinking about. A programmer named Mr. Peng, who works in IT at a manufacturing company in the Yangtze River Delta, says his department no longer hires fresh graduates. “We completely stopped recruiting them,” he says. The decision wasn’t loud. It didn’t make headlines. It just happened, sometime in the past year, as AI agents began quietly taking over the work that entry-level programmers used to do.
The agent in question is OpenClaw, an open-source tool nicknamed “lobster” in Chinese. It arrived in January, and by March people were lining up on the streets of Shenzhen and Beijing to have engineers install it on their laptops. The national internet emergency center issued a security warning within days. On二手 platforms, the same vendors who once charged 499 yuan for installation pivoted to offering 299 yuan removal services. The whole cycle — mania, panic, retreat — took about 40 days.
But the retreat was never going to be total. For every person who deleted the software, someone else kept it running. Mr. Peng did. He says AI now writes 50% of his team’s code. Two years from now, he predicts, it will be 90%. He mentioned The Mythical Man-Month, the 1975 software engineering classic that argues adding people to a late project only makes it later. That principle, he says, is starting to feel obsolete. “Because ‘people’ is being removed from the equation.”
I keep thinking about what happens to the people on the other side of that removal. In March, the IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva visited China and described AI’s impact on jobs as a “tsunami.” But tsunamis are visible. What Mr. Peng is describing is quieter: a gradual thinning of entry-level roles, a hiring freeze that no one announces, a slow closing of the door that used to lead into a career.
Some young Chinese are responding by starting “one-person companies,” or OPCs — a term that appears in local government policy documents with surprising frequency. Suzhou pledged 70 million yuan to cultivate 10,000 OPC talents by 2028. Chengdu offers 20,000 yuan subsidies for AI-driven solo startups. The logic is clear: if companies won’t hire, let people become companies themselves. A 26-year-old former product manager in Shanghai told DW he now earns up to 40,000 yuan a month making AI-generated ads.
But a one-person company is still one person. There is a loneliness baked into this model that the subsidies don’t address. The same week I read about OpenClaw, I also read about the “Are You Dead?” app — a simple check-in tool for people living alone, which briefly topped China’s App Store charts before being pulled offline. Its premise was stark: if you don’t tap a button for 48 hours, it alerts your emergency contact. Tens of thousands of people downloaded it. They were paying for the feeling that someone might notice.
These two stories — the AI agent that replaces entry-level jobs, and the app that checks if you’re still alive — describe the same condition. Chinese cities are full of people working alone, living alone, and now, increasingly, being told that their solitude is a feature, not a bug. The OPC policy packages celebrate the solo entrepreneur as the future of work. The “lobster” promises to do the job of three people. No one is asking who those three people are, or where they went.
Mr. Peng, for what it’s worth, says his advice to young people is simple: “The only thing I can do now is save money.” It is not a heroic response. But it is honest. And honesty, these days, feels like a kind of resistance.