I came away feeling recharged.
I met many builders pushing their setups to the limit with OpenClaw, which has lately been serving as a kind of OS for the AI agent ecosystem. Someone running an unlimited social media crawling pipeline on two M3 Ultra machines with 512GB each. Someone taking apart Codex and Claude Code and wiring them directly into their own agents. Someone using OpenClaw to automate work for millennial and Gen Z office workers who dread phone calls. The room was full of energy, with people moving fast, taking initiative, and trying to build something and prove it works.
What makes this interesting is that it marks something new in the history of Korea’s developer community. Through vibe coding and OpenClaw, a sizable number of junior developers are making their mark in global open-source communities, racking up GitHub stars. Without going through translations or waiting for localization, they are creating or contributing directly to global repos and putting themselves at the heart of the community. This may be the first time a group of Korean builders like this has emerged at this scale.
Still, one frustration came up again today. Korea has plenty of talented developers. The problem is that the platforms where they put that talent to work are all overseas. Every example shared at the meetup, and every API behind it, came from a US service. You rarely hear about agents connected to APIs from Korean services. No, you can’t. A few days ago, I started preparing a small effort to address this problem myself. I’m eager to get it to a meaningful stage quickly and share it.
It was also striking to see young developer friends who are Hashed Vibe Labs fellows making their presence felt at the center of it all. Being around them makes me feel I should be working harder on something too. Good energy spreads deeply, and irreversibly.
