We ran our own AI lock-in retreat

Back to the scene from the first note — the lock-in retreat we joined, run by the Donghaeng Club team (formerly Netflyeonga).

That was where it became clear: alone, AI keeps getting postponed; shut in one room, holding onto one whole day next to someone else, it strangely opens up.

The feeling stuck with us, so we asked the Donghaeng Club team for their blessing and ran the same format at PEERS. (Thank you to their team for building the experience first.)

Three days, two nights, in Daeseong-ri. All twenty PEERS members came.

The method was simple. Two four-hour sprint hackathons a day. At the end of each sprint, a mandatory ten-minute presentation covering the process, what you learned, and a live demo. Once the day's goal was done, the rest of the evening was free — and there was a barbecue.

Nobody worked on an instructor's example. Everyone brought one piece of their own work, the kind you'd use the day you got back.

At the moment you'd normally give up if you were alone, being shut in made giving up impossible. "The person next to me is still at it." And some things that had been stuck for weeks got solved in five minutes by asking, "how did you do that?"

Over those three days, these actually got built:

- A website (the one you're reading this on) - Workflow automation for an online seller - A quote-sending system mapped to the customer journey - A member dashboard and automated settlement - A tool for organizing real-estate listings - A stock-advice bot - Automated marketing reports - Automatic crawling of YouTube shorts

None of it was polished. But everyone walked out having finally done the thing they hadn't been able to do.

Alone you postpone it; shut in together, it opens up. That one sentence is the clearest thing we confirmed.

You can do AI alone. But you don't have to.

Do not AI alone.

From PEERS