When Yong Quan Tan graduated from college in 2023, he was still thinking of himself as a “traditional software engineer.”
Playing around with OpenAI’s GPT -4, which had come out that March, worried him that his developer skills wouldn’t be enough to get or keep a job in tech.
“I was freaking out. I was like, OK, I have to go for AI events because I have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “It feels like the asteroid is going to hit the dinosaurs anytime soon.”
He went looking for somewhere to learn what was happening. In Singapore, where he is based, there wasn’t much of an AI scene to find.
While Singapore is home to thousands of tech startups, what it lacked, according to the AI builders Business Insider spoke to, was the developer culture associated with hubs like San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru that produced “cracked” engineers — slang for exceptionally talented coders.
AI has changed that dramatically.
Over the past two years, a collection of grassroots organizers, hackathons, and builder communities has turned Singapore into an unlikely hotbed for people who want to create software. Vibe coding — using natural language to get AI to write software — has lowered the mental and financial cost of building and given almost anyone a ticket into the AI boom.
That momentum has given AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, and scaleups like Cursor and Cognition, an incentive to establish Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore, adding hundreds of tech and non-tech jobs.
No presentation slides
For Tan, the turning point came in late 2024, when he came across the Singapore chapter of AI Tinkerers, a San Francisco-based group that hosts AI meetups.
The format was deliberately unlike the buttoned-up tech events he was used to. Builders showed each other how they were using the latest AI models to build tools for their daily lives — rough, buggy projects were welcome, while presentation slides were not.
Tan was hooked. When Henry Mao, who founded the Singapore chapter of AI Tinkerers, wanted to step away to work full-time on his startup, Tan kept asking to take over.
“Henry was like, I’ve never seen anyone be so persistent. OK, you get it, bro,” Tan said, adding that he took over the group last year.
AI Tinkerers Singapore, now called Natives, runs demo nights, workshops, and hackathons focused on everything from voice agents to agentic workflows. Its events regularly draw more than 100 people — a number capped by venue constraints rather than applicant interest, according to Tan.
“We were just running events, but then people suddenly started to feel like this could be something that they were a part of, something that they belong to,” Tan said.
He said two attendees met through the community and went on to cofound an agentic AI startup together.
The comeback story
AI Tinkerers wasn’t the only group noticing the hunger to bring back tech-focused conversations and community.
Before the pandemic, Singapore had a buzzing, established tech and hackathon scene, centered on startup incubators like BLOCK71 and backed heavily by universities, government agencies, and corporates like Grab and Amazon. Hackathons spanning consumer tech, blockchain, and smart-city tech routinely drew hundreds of builders, before the scene dwindled during and after COVID.
65labs, a Singapore-based builder collective, entered 2025 with a philosophy of hosting events designed to send attendees home wanting to make something.
Its Cursor hackathon in October received more than 1,000 applications and brought hundreds of builders together for 24 hours. Participants shipped nearly 150 working products, including an AI “auntie” that reminds you to take your meds with humor, and a LinkedIn-based dating app that could help you check your compatibility with AMD’s Lisa Su. 10 sponsors committed more than $400,000 in resources and support to winning teams.
By May 2026, 65labs had helped bring AI Engineer’s first Asian conference to Singapore. More than 1,000 people attended the three-day conference backed by companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Vercel, Cloudflare, and Stripe. Its 92-person speaker roster was filled with founders and experts from the world’s biggest AI companies who had flown 16 hours from San Francisco to demo what they’re building with AI.
A surprise addition to the slate was Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan, who spoke about how he uses NanoClaw agents and how he’s a “geek” and “tinkerer” himself. Built as a more secure alternative to OpenClaw, NanoClaw agents are lightweight, open-source personal AI assistants that can perform tasks such as answering emails or sorting photos.
A common takeaway from the explosion of X and LinkedIn posts that followed the conference was: Don’t dismiss Singapore as an AI hub, things are just getting started.
Rise of the non-technical founder
For Nehal Agrawal, who dis communications AI Engineer, the important part of that recent boom isn’t simply that Singapore has more AI events: it’s about who feels like they belong at them.
When Agrawal graduated in 2024 as a business major, to her, AI was synonymous with ChatGPT. She said that people in research or engineering started learning how to use AI, but as someone non-technical, AI felt “gated.”
Vibe coding blew a hole through that gate.
At one builder event she attended in early 2026, Agrawal said roughly 1,000 people, ranging from 18-year-olds to people in their 80s, turned up on a Monday night.
It’s not just fitness trackers and browser games; vibe coding has changed who can be a founder. At AI Engineer Singapore, there was a high concentration of non-technical founders who had taught themselves to use Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to launch and scale their startups.
“Suddenly, people around me are talking about evals, harnesses, loops, context, and these are all non-technical people,” Agrawal said.
To her, AI-native doesn’t mean suddenly knowing how to write thousands of lines of Python. It’s about how to direct models, test their output, and stitch tools together for your personal projects, work, or side hustles.
Agrawal, who now shares AI workflows and automations she has built on her own website, said vibe coding changed her perception of what she could make.
“It has removed a lot of psychological barriers to your own strengths or to your own capacity of learning,” she said.
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