The spread of vibe coding, which assigns programming to AI through natural language, is reinvigorating Singapore's developer culture. As even non-professional developers can build software quickly, hackathons and developer meetups are increasing. Some cases are also emerging that lead to startups.

On Aug. 31, local time, IT outlet Business Insider reported that Singapore has thousands of tech startups, but has been assessed as having a relatively weak homegrown developer culture compared with San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Bengaluru. Over the past two years, sentiment has shifted as AI tools have lowered technical and psychological barriers to development.

A representative community is Natives. It started as the Singapore chapter of AI Tinkerers, which began in San Francisco. It holds demos, workshops and hackathons on topics such as voice agents and agent-based work automation. More than 100 people attend regularly, and there have been cases in which participants met and co-founded AI startups.

Large hackathons have also returned. More than 1,000 applications were submitted for the Cursor Hackathon held by Singapore developer group 65labs in October last year, and about 300 people built around 150 working products over 24 hours. Global AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind took part, and 10 sponsors provided the winning teams with resources and support totalling more than $400,000 (about 54.8 million won).

More than 1,000 people also attended Asia's first AI Engineer Singapore event held in May. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cursor, Cloudflare and Stripe sponsored it, and 92 founders and technology experts spoke. Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan (비비안 발라크리쉬난) also took the stage to introduce how he uses AI agents.

The change is particularly evident among non-developers. Founders who majored in management and marketing are also learning Claude Code, Codex and Cursor to build products themselves. The analysis is that vibe coding is expanding the boundary of who can make software beyond simply boosting development speed, drawing new talent into Singapore's AI startup ecosystem.