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.
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.
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.
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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.
Source: Read the original article on www.businessinsider.com
