What Are Chinese People Vibecoding?

Domestic vs Western Agents and App Store dominance

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“Tinkering culture has no borders, and companies are cashing in.”

“Vibecoding” doesn’t lend itself to easy translation. For now, Chinese speakers call it 氛围编程 fènwéi biānchéng, 氛围 being “atmosphere”/”vibes” and 编程 being coding. This is an awkward expression because 氛围 usually refers to the atmosphere of a space or environment, and doesn’t have the connotation of care-free DIY that “vibe” does in colloquial American English. 氛围编程 sounds nonsensical as a phrase — something like “coding up an atmosphere.”

But we make do, and oftentimes writers simply use the English word. Developers, creatives, and entrepreneurs in China have been creating many interesting coding projects with AI tools over the past year, utilizing not only popular tools by Silicon Valley giants like Cursor and Claude Code, but also domestic models as Chinese AI companies increasingly compete in the coding-agent market.

Tinkering culture has no borders, and companies are cashing in. This is a roundup of reports from Chinese media on how vibecoding is changing the landscape of technology in China, featuring:

• Genius 12-year-olds;

• The race for domestic coding agents;

• And how to vibecode your way to the top of the App Store.