[DigitalToday reporter Seulgi Son] "If I download a few card-news images and put them into Claude Code and ask it to set a design similar to this, it gets you part of the way."

On the evening of March 17, reporters gathered at a location in Seoul's Gangnam district. It was for the final session of a "reporter runnerthon" run by vibe-coding startup Popup Studio. They presented mini projects they made over four weeks. There were 7 participants. Most had never even opened a terminal.

Vibe coding is a way to make software by giving instructions to AI in natural language. If you describe the desired "vibe" without a programming language, AI implements it.

The first presenter, a foundation public relations staffer identified as A, showed an automated card-news generation tool. When a report is entered, AI summarises it and lays it out in a card format. Users can choose from 3 styles and 4 colours. A plans to use it for Instagram and KakaoTalk channels.

A reporter identified as B, who is in charge at a startup, built a health management app to track exercise and diet on a daily and monthly basis. B described the process, saying it was finished only just before the presentation. At first, the screen appeared but tabs did not work. That was because AI produced an initial draft as a plausible-looking mock-up with no functions. When B captured the error screen and gave it to AI, it fixed itself. B was reminded of advice from the four-week runnerthon: "The more fully you explain the context, the higher the chance of fixing errors" and "If you get stuck, ask AI."

A reporter presented a "Public Procurement Service notice alert". It is a bot that collects artificial intelligence and software bidding results from 22 agencies under the Ministry of Science and ICT and sends them via Telegram. It automated work that involved manually searching Nara Marketplace every day. It tells the reporter every morning which government projects covered companies won and how large they are. Sometimes it also shows award information worth tens of billions of won.

It started with a single folder. The key point of the first week was that the folder you make soon becomes the service. The integrated development environment used was Microsoft's VS Code.

The key is context engineering, which structurally delivers context to AI. As developers do, you can create a markdown file in the project folder and write guidelines. A file called "CLAUDE.md" contains instructions such as "Talk in Korean", "Explain first before modifying code" and "Modify only one file at a time". As you build up layers such as a README with a project outline, the folder structure and a summary of the current status, AI grasps the overall picture. A tip emphasised in class was that, in writing markdown, "DO NOT" is better than "DO."

An extension of that is "document-based coding". If files needed to run the project, such as a Public Data Portal API key and a Claude API key, are stored in the folder, the project can be expanded with a single command: "Make it by referring to the file at this path." In the same way, an array of more than 30 keywords including "AI", "artificial intelligence", "LLM", "generative AI" and "MSP" was designed and reflected in the code.

The bot was completed after 9 chat sessions. For deployment, it used GitHub Actions, a free automation tool. The model used to analyse procurement information was Anthropic's Claude Haiku. It is said to be suitable for repetitive work because it is fast and inexpensive. The actual overall operating cost was a few won per case.

The procurement alert also won first prize. Choi Jun-ho (최준호), content lead at Popup Studio who planned the runnerthon, said, "The No. 1 is clearly a program used in actual work." He added, "Vibe coding is continuing to work with AI as a colleague," and suggested, "Before long, developers will disappear and only builders will remain, so let us all become builders."

After the runnerthon ended, participants commonly spoke about the importance of reporting. A reporter identified as C said, "In the end, the seniors who told us to meet lots of people and go to the field were right." A reporter identified as D shot back, "The age of barbarism is coming again."