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.)
In fact, a throwback to traditional Chinese spirituality and Western New Age practices pervades much of the town. I checked a local event guide during my visit; it included an I Ching guide to dressing for luck, a Zen sutra reading, and an essential-oils workshop for healing. A singing-bowl sound-therapy studio sat beside a boutique that sold only linen and silk clothing, cut loose and draping enough to make the wearer look faintly monk-like. Crystals were in one shop window; tarot upstairs. Astrology, consumerism, and A.I. were folded into one another as though they had always belonged together—reminiscent of an older era of Silicon Valley when spirituality and personal computing grew out of the same countercultural milieu. I asked Ian Johnson, a Canadian-American reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Chinese religious life in the early two-thousands, about the way spirituality was manifesting among young people in the A.I. generation. “They’re like the Woodstock generation in the West,” he told me. Johnson explained that the previous generation in China underwent rapid economic development and huge leaps in the availability of material goods. For their children, existential questions have emerged, and in the fast-moving, chaotic tech world, he added, uncertainty feels especially acute. “Why one company succeeds and another fails can seem almost metaphysical,” Johnson said.
Levy, the founder of FateTell, is a star in Liangzhu. A graduate of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he once worked at ByteDance, the company that created TikTok. He is lean, with a slight frame and a calculating gaze—though he speaks softly and contemplatively. He told me he has long been interested in how technology intersects with spirituality, referencing both the I Ching and Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” and, after I told him that I live in the Bay Area, he said, with a small conspiratorial grin, that he had cast the bazi of every major A.I. leader. His reading of Sam Altman’s bazi: “a mercenary accountant.” Elon Musk, he said, “will have a very bumpy few years.” He had almost named the company Muad’Dib, after the nickname that the character Paul Atreides takes among the Fremen in “Dune,” but FateTell had the benefit of being slightly more literal.
At the party, Levy introduced me to the FateTell team, a group of eight people, among whom almost no moment goes un-astrologized. One engineer took a two-week vow of silence because his bazi had warned him that he was losing his sense of self by excessively describing his life—an increasingly common affliction for a generation immersed in Chinese social media. All eight employees had had their charts checked for compatibility before being hired. The C.O.O. treated my bazi as if it were as important as my last name and warned me, “The Year of the Fire Horse might bring you fame, but also exhaustion and illness.”
Before entering the tech world, Levy had considered becoming a Taoist monk. “Years ago, a great master told me I had a gift for the spirit,” he said. “He nearly took me up into the mountains to cultivate the Tao.” But Levy’s love of A.I. proved the stronger pull, and he instead attempted to merge Taoism with that. “I’ve wanted to build a Taoist app since 2017,” he explained. “The years since have been preparation—I met hundreds of practitioners and diviners, and read my way through the classical scriptures.” Then, after DeepSeek launched, he was convinced that the time had finally come.
It was late 2024, a year after Xi Jinping had named A.I. an essential engine for China’s “new quality productive forces,” when the country’s tech companies began releasing, one after another, open-weight models that stunned Silicon Valley. DeepSeek, working with scarce compute, came within reach of the world’s most capable A.I. models at a fraction of the cost of American firms like OpenAI and Anthropic; behind it, other Chinese labs—Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Z.ai—seemingly sprang up overnight and seized global headlines. Chinese users noticed something that ChatGPT had never offered them: DeepSeek R1’s culturally attuned intelligence and elegant Chinese prose, both the fruit of a high-quality Chinese-language pre-training base and reinforcement learning layered on top. Until then, the A.I. most Chinese people had used felt imported and translated. R1 was the first that sounded native to China. DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng—who is mysterious and largely absent from public view—seemed to arrive out of nowhere. In some corners of the Chinese internet, DeepSeek has even been touted as proof that China’s “national destiny” has arrived. Netizens posted their exchanges with it, awed by its philosophical depth. Then came the deluge: R1-powered fortune-telling swept the Chinese internet.
As reasoning models matured, Levy decided it was time to build his own company. “Fortune-telling is like food and shelter,” he told me. “It’s a real human need, thousands of years old.” His logic runs like this: the better a model gets at coding and math, the better it must get at fortune-telling, as he believes that bazi is itself a rigorous system of statistical decision-making. He often repeats a claim by Song-chun Zhu, who heads Peking University’s School of Intelligence Science and Technology: I Ching, the divination system behind bazi, may be humanity’s earliest exercise in statistical decision modelling, its first data set for deciding how to act.
And the business is lucrative. In China, the A.I. fortune-telling industry passed a hundred and twenty billion yuan in 2025, growing nearly forty-four per cent a year, faster than most enterprise A.I. The West is experiencing a version of this, too: the same human need for spiritual guidance brought an explosion of A.I.-companion apps and therapy chatbots in America. In a recent essay in the Times, the author Yi-Ling Liu argued that people in both China and the U.S. are “turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control.”
Liangzhu’s role as a hot spot for A.I. innovation is not random. Strolling through the empty, gleaming streets of the town, I saw a sign describing Liangzhu, in the enormous blocky gold characters favored by the Chinese Communist Party:
Many key words from the slogan are coded deep in Xi Jinping Thought, the official political doctrine of China’s ruler. Xi-isms combine Maoist Marxism with what the President has dubbed “The Road to National Rejuvenation.” This means binding pride in China’s five-thousand-year civilization to technological supremacy and “common prosperity,” presenting them as parts of the same national revival.
In 2003, a then obscure provincial Party secretary—Xi, who was fifty years old and was running Zhejiang Province—visited Liangzhu. Back then, the town was a rural, rapidly industrializing fringe of Hangzhou with a largely undeveloped archaeological site that featured Neolithic tombs and settlements buried deep beneath farmland. Dozens of industrial quarries dotted the surrounding hills; the blasting and dust was so constant that one renowned archaeologist had described the area as resembling “a war zone.”According to the Party’s official history, Xi ordered the last few quarries shut down, imagining that this sparse landscape could be a prime location for a shared spiritual home of the Chinese nation. That same year, Xi launched “Digital Zhejiang,” an initiative that promoted information technology as the engine of the province’s industrialization, and made high-tech development a central part of his governing agenda.
Two decades later, China’s tech sector was entering its deepest crisis. After China lifted “Zero COVID” at the end of 2022, and after the financial crisis that followed, an industry that was once defined by high salaries, lavish hiring, and vertiginous growth turned grim. In 2022 alone, Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, and Baidu shed nearly forty thousand jobs between them. One company after another entered “structural adjustment” and “workforce optimization,” euphemisms for mass layoffs and wage freezes. Alibaba’s stock has lost around two-thirds of its value after the “disappearance” of Jack Ma, the company’s former C.E.O. Amid deflation and a stalling economy, the tech gold rush seemed to many to be over. Then came the A.I. boom. All of a sudden, almost everyone began vibe coding, and one person with an idea could build software that once required a team of engineers. For China’s battered tech workers and newly unemployed graduates, the conclusion was almost a no-brainer: A.I. offered them a sense of agency, and their best remaining chance to build something successful.
Around this time, a product manager at a tech company in Beijing, known as Master Qi, decided to leave his role. “I have A.D.H.D. and dyslexia,” Qi told me, “My body couldn’t take a demanding tech job anymore.” He began developing apps on his own, and eventually moved to Liangzhu. He and many others would call themselves North Defectors. The term usually refers to North Koreans who have fled to South Korea. In Liangzhu, a warm and humid southern city, “North” means Beijing. Here, Qi explained, you could rent a place with a living room for cheap. (A two-bedroom apartment in Liangzhu is between three to four thousand yuan a month, roughly the cost of a single bedroom in Beijing.) Finally, Qi had a spacious apartment of his own. “Somewhere to invite people in, like in ‘Friends’ ” he said on an A.I.-focussed podcast he started. And he did invite people in—hundreds of them. Qi turned his spare room into a gathering spot in town for coders, aspiring founders, and investors looking for promising projects. Soon, Master Qi’s living room became a local sensation; before long, he was capping attendance and charging at the door. He also moved the “living room” to someone’s back yard, which had more space. The sessions have brokered more than a few deals between founders and investors. (Levy met one of FateTell’s first employees in Qi’s living room.)
In the years since he first arrived, Qi has become Liangzhu’s chaotic, unofficial village head. His approach to A.I. was quasi-therapeutic; his goal is to battle and tend to an imperfect self. His first app was a minimalist white-noise tool for insomnia; his second, a to-do list for forgetful people. Like every builder who is apologetic about his executive function, he has countless half-finished app prototypes, he told me, while drawing a long breath.
In Liangzhu’s tech scene, Master Qi’s living room has plenty of competition, including “Crazy Thursday,” a similar type of gathering hosted by Tualatrix, a tech influencer. The name is taken from a meme about “Crazy Thursday”—derived from KFC’s advertising for a popular weekly discount day in China—which later evolved into a self-deprecating joke about desperate young people obsessed with cheap fried chicken and free money. Both Crazy Thursday and Master Qi’s living room have become modestly known scenes in Chinese tech. People fly in from Beijing, Shenzhen, even Silicon Valley, to sit in. “The place is full of hidden dragons and crouching tigers,” one visitor to Qi’s living room told me. “You could be mid-demo, and there are billionaires in the audience!”
In March, 2025, Tim Cook made a surprise appearance in Liangzhu, and later dropped in on Mediastorm and HTX Studio, two of China’s most-followed tech vloggers, both of whom had relocated their headquarters to Liangzhu. He signed people’s MacBooks and posed for photos with Mediastorm’s hundred-person staff. A local outlet reported the visit with glee: “Was Tim Cook eyeing our Liangzhu living room?”
Then, last September, the local government launched what is known in English as “Seeker One” (a more literal translation might be “Digital Habitat Bay”): an A.I. incubator offering subsidized office space, venture-capital matchmaking, and a mission statement that reads like recycled Xi-era boilerplate—continuously attracting talents for “new quality productive forces.” Qi was invited to cut the ribbon of Digital Habitat Bay’s grand opening as one of the six “honorary hosts.” In a photo from the ceremony, Qi is standing stiffly beside a Party official, his hands pressed tightly against his sides. Officials also courted Tualatrix, urging him to relocate Crazy Thursday from a coffee shop to a government-backed event space. He refused; the geek atmosphere of Crazy Thursday was not something that could be reverse engineered.
One founder, who asked not to be named, told me he was worried that the local government’s embrace of Liangzhu’s tech scene meant its relevance might be on the wane. In fact, he was already scouting new locations, preparing for the next exodus, saying that the increased attention toward the town meant it only had a few years before it became something else entirely.
Back at the FateTell party, Levy greeted his guests with practiced ease, though I could tell he was terrified that something might go wrong. FateTell is one of the few A.I. companies in Liangzhu that is actually making money, and making money in China, in 2026, is often grim, hopeless work.
The app’s office sits a stone’s throw away from the Liangzhu ruins, on the second floor of a gray building that used to be an elementary school in the village. The land was requisitioned a few years back, and the building was repurposed as the Liangzhu Youth Commune—one of the many incubators that have sprung up across the region. The office itself was once a classroom. Two long blackboards remain, and the office-warming guests had covered them in blessings. I wrote mine in red chalk, playing my part as the token Fire person: May FateTell blaze red and prosper, may all things go well.
In the middle of the party, Levy led me up to the top floor and pointed toward the fire escape. Sometimes, he said, he climbs out onto the roof at night. The stars are bright there—brighter than you’d expect this close to Hangzhou, which adds to the town’s pastoral feel. He wonders if shamans in Liangzhu, many thousands of years ago, were doing something similar to what he is doing now—whether their ancient star maps were a way of saying that the world, however chaotic and confusing, contained a pattern that humans could predict. He told me that his relationship to A.I. feels something like that, a predictive instrument for a world that won’t hold still. ♦