What China’s Vibe-Coding Capital Can Tell Us About the A.I. Boom

In mid-May, days after Donald Trump visited Beijing, a Chinese tech founder named Levy invited me to an office party for his A.I. fortune-telling company. It’s called FateTell, and it makes an app that, in the vein of traditional Chinese astrology, reads your bazi, a chart that tracks the elemental forces associated with your birth date and time. (Levy wanted me at the event because of the makeup of my bazi. According to his invitation, my governing element, fire, would counteract the water element that Levy carries in oversupply.) So I travelled from Beijing to FateTell’s headquarters, situated on the edge of Hangzhou—one of China’s tech hubs, home to Alibaba and the insurgent Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek—in a town called Liangzhu.

Liangzhu means “beautiful waterland,” and it more than earns the name—rivers, lakes, and marshes thread through the low hills at the town’s edge. The town is hip, idyllic, contrarian, and increasingly known as an escape for workers burnt out by the grind of China’s booming tech industry. To those back in Beijing or Shenzhen, Liangzhu has become a low-cost retreat where people can afford to vibe-code—building software through conversations with A.I., as opposed to writing source code at a line-by-line level–on their own terms, without having to work what is known as the 9-9-6, an extreme schedule that is common in Chinese tech firms of working from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., six days a week.

Residents often dub themselves “villagers,” and describe Liangzhu as between rural and suburban. Between verdant parks and wide avenues, they sit on sprawling grass fields—a way of relaxing that is rare in most major Chinese cities, where lawns are usually cordoned off. Often, there is a stroller parked next to them. (China’s birth rate has plummeted to its lowest point since 1949, but, in the area where Liangzhu is, the birth rate is double the national average).

It didn’t take me long after my arrival in Liangzhu to stumble upon the town’s growing population of vibe-coders. Near Liangzhu’s cultural and art center, a sprawling structure designed by Tadao Ando and surrounded by cherry blossoms, I overheard young developers murmuring about Kimi, a Chinese large language model, and OpenAI’s Codex. Some had dogs at their feet. Others were coding over oat-milk lattes. The building’s nickname, I learned, is the Big Roof. Nearby stands another towering structure, called the Big Barn, which contains a vast bookstore. The structures, made of raw concrete, exuded an ostentatious form of modesty, emblematic of the town’s character.

Everywhere I went, people were building new A.I. products. This is not unique to Liangzhu. In the past few years, as the A.I. boom went global, Beijing has made A.I. a national priority, launching a campaign known as A.I. Plus to seed it throughout the economy. China’s major tech companies are bracing for the same transformation, pouring money into semiconductors, large language models, and cloud infrastructure, as well as the consumer products that are built on top of them. But, unlike the everything apps that are favored by most of these big tech companies, much of the software built in Liangzhu is whimsical and quirky, similar in spirit to an artisanal craft you might pick up at a small-scale farmers’ market. FocusFlight, a timer that simulates an immersive flight environment to improve concentration, plays white noise while you “fly” to a city. (As I wrote this piece, I “flew” from San Francisco to Los Angeles.) YouMind, an A.I. workflow tool, bills itself as a “second brain” that helps people “create bolder” by gathering scattered reading, notes, and research in one place and turning it into finished work (one of their ads is an A.I.-generated video that tells the story of an exhausted mother with no income, trying to write as a baby cries in the background; later, she is pictured using YouMind, and becomes happy and successful). And then there is FateTell, which feeds your bazi through large language models and spits out guides “based on thousands of years of Eastern wisdom.” The app has hundreds of thousands of users, the most devoted of whom pay an annual fee to subscribe. (Levy told me they’re also exploring a hardware direction: making wooden blocks shaped like moons—traditional divination tools that are thrown to seek spiritual guidance—embedded with smart chips.)