More and more people are turning Xiaohongshu into an AI incubator.
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More and more people are turning Xiaohongshu into an AI incubator.
For “AI natives,” the new paradigm of creation includes not only AI but also building in public on Xiaohongshu.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Zhou Yongliang
An intriguing phenomenon is unfolding.
In this wave of AI advancement, the most active figures on center stage are no longer seasoned “STEM prodigies.” Instead, a surge of young people with humanities backgrounds has emerged—and their age has dropped dramatically compared to the previous golden era around age 30. Post-2000s (Gen Z) and even post-2010s (Gen Alpha) creators are appearing in droves.
The deeper reason behind this shift is that AI is transforming entrepreneurship from a “heavy” model into a “light” era.
In the past, launching a startup demanded a grand narrative: top-down market insight, and proof of capability to mobilize capital and assemble teams. It was a high-barrier game.
Today, AI has increased the world’s “resolution.” A tiny pain point—or even a whimsical idea—from one person or a small group becomes a single pixel, sufficient to seed an entire product. More importantly, an individual or small team with vision can now deliver a complete—and even outstanding—product.
This realization hit me especially hard last weekend at the Xiaohongshu Hackathon Grand Finals.
On the final pitch stage, there was no tense, competitive atmosphere—instead, it felt more like a vibrant “product creation camp.” One young face after another stepped up, blending geeky shyness with creator fervor. Most unexpectedly, a team of 12- and 13-year-old middle schoolers won the special “AI Native” Award.
Meanwhile, innovation granularity has become extraordinarily fine: one team was dreaming of “embedding a personal server into a satellite,” while the next tackled the problem that “AI-generated PowerPoint slides look terrible”; here, a husband-and-wife duo was building a brain-controlled wheelchair for people with disabilities; over there, another team was using AI to solve the age-old communication dilemma between clients and hair stylists named Tony…
The overall Grand Prize went to the DAIZY team’s “Pocket Guitar.” About the size of a smartphone, it slips easily into your pocket. Through clever design, it addresses three core pain points for music lovers: traditional guitars have steep learning curves; simplified instruments remain bulky; and mobile apps completely sacrifice the authentic tactile sensation of strumming strings. With Pocket Guitar, an absolute beginner can deliver a polished singing-and-guitar performance within minutes.
This signals something clear: a new generation of young, diverse “digital natives” is redefining innovation in the AI era—through lighter, nimbler means. They are true “AI Natives”: for them, AI isn’t a tool to be “learned”—it’s a native language.
This hackathon wasn’t so much a competition as a concentrated showcase of this generation’s everyday creative practice—a collective “coming-of-age ceremony” for the new wave of AI Natives.
I. A New Entrepreneurial Narrative
Historically, tech innovation followed the “Silicon Valley playbook”: an idea, a business plan, iterative refinement, then knocking on VC doors. The starting point of entrepreneurship was secretive.
But at the 2026 Xiaohongshu Hackathon, I witnessed a radically different approach among Gen Z—and even Gen Alpha—participants. Let’s call it the “Xiaohongshu Playbook.” Their entrepreneurial starting point is no longer a business plan—but a “note.” A practice known as “Build in Public” is rewriting the old rules.
Gen Z serial entrepreneur Chen Jinchu brands himself a “professional meme-maker.” He has 13,000 followers on Xiaohongshu, where he posts playful AI mini-tools—and candidly shares failures and “mystical insights” from his entrepreneurial journey.
Starting in January this year, he began regularly documenting his “vibe coding” projects on Xiaohongshu to help products achieve cold starts. Within half a year, his product nuwa attracted 100,000 users.
At this hackathon, his project was “Cyber Headband,” a self-discipline device shaped like a headband, equipped with a camera and microcurrent module. Users set rules in the app—like “no smoking” or “no short-video scrolling during work hours.” Once the headband’s camera detects a violation, a gentle electric current delivers immediate physical feedback.
This is worlds apart from the earlier “code-is-king” hacker era. Today’s creators no longer hide development behind closed doors—they turn it into a live “reality show” co-evolving with their community.
23-year-old Lai Xinlu is founder of open-source community Share AI Lab. Interestingly, he almost never uses traditional job platforms. His core engineering team is scattered across the globe—their recruitment often begins simply by stumbling upon a technical discussion post on Xiaohongshu, bonding through lively comments, and instantly “matching perfectly” to join forces.
From demand discovery and team formation to cold starts and continuous iteration, Xiaohongshu provides this generation of developers with a complete, ultra-low-cost innovation loop.
In my view, they differ significantly from the previous generation of developers. Whether PC-internet-era webmasters or mobile-internet-era app developers, the prior cohort resembled “hunters”—scouting for trends, meticulously crafting a product, aiming for a single decisive hit. If they missed, they’d simply seek the next prey.
By contrast, the AI-native generation resembles “farmers.” They plant ideas in the fertile soil of online communities and nurture them daily through “public building”—watering, iterating, and growing alongside users until their creations sprout, blossom, and bear fruit. This process brims with uncertainty—but also with far greater vitality.
II. Two Levers Reshaping Innovation
A wave of AI-native entrepreneurs is rising collectively. Yet we must ask: Why this generation? Why on a platform like Xiaohongshu?
The answer lies in the convergence of two epochal trends—creating unprecedented momentum for innovation.
The first lever is AI-driven technological democratization.
In the past, building an app required mastery of complex programming languages, databases, server operations—high barriers indeed.
Today, the explosion of generative AI is transferring technical authority—previously held by elite algorithm scientists and top-tier engineers—into the hands of anyone with ideas and creativity. Development ability is no longer scarce; the value of creation is being amplified anew.
The Page One team—winners of this year’s hackathon “AI Native” Special Award—comprises four middle-schoolers averaging just 13.5 years old.
Their project, “Shu Yi NoteRx,” functions like an “AI personal doctor” for Xiaohongshu notes. Using a proprietary model and a “multi-round debate mechanism” involving five AI agents, it delivers data-driven diagnostics and optimization recommendations for creators.
When 13-year-old Yang Xizhe spoke confidently onstage, you didn’t see a “child prodigy”—you saw a vivid “AI Native.” For him, “coding feels like playing a video game,” and innovation itself is pure joy. After playing *The Legend of Zelda*, he wanted to build his own game—and began learning programming. When stuck on coding problems, AI became his most patient tutor. He posted his AI-powered vocabulary-learning method on Xiaohongshu and unexpectedly garnered millions of views—comments flooded in from parents and classmates seeking guidance.
The second lever is the community-powered force of “building publicly” on social media.
This generation of “AI Natives” are also “social-media natives.” Sharing isn’t a learned strategy—it’s an innate instinct. Accustomed to documenting life and expressing opinions, they seamlessly transfer this instinct into creation and entrepreneurship.
Gen Z developer Sun Donglai’s “Dreamoo Dream Social” app essentially grew entirely on Xiaohongshu.
It began with a research post: his team wanted to test whether “using AI to materialize dreams and enable dream-based social interaction” was viable. Surprisingly, this zero-budget post garnered tens of thousands of views and thousands of interactions. The comment section became a natural demand-insight pool—some users said they recorded 800-word dream journals daily; others, unable to find suitable tools, even serialized their dreams on novel websites.
These raw, authentic responses convinced Sun Donglai he’d tapped into a real, overlooked need. So he co-created everything—from product naming and feature decisions to UI design—with users via notes. In its first month, Dreamoo acquired 3,000 early adopters solely through Xiaohongshu’s organic traffic and user word-of-mouth.
When “AI-driven technological equality” meets “community-based public building,” a new innovation landscape emerges: AI lowers the barrier to “making things,” while community solves the challenges of “being needed” and “being discovered.”
More importantly, the innovator base has become unprecedentedly diverse. Middle-schoolers, humanities graduates, designers, people with disabilities—regardless of background, if you possess a good idea and keen human insight, you may create something truly valuable.
Innovations rooted in such communities no longer obsess over grand narratives or disruptive revolutions. Instead, they dig deep into concrete, granular real-world pain points, itch points, and delight points—diverse, long-tail, and highly specialized—collectively forming a robust tech ecosystem.
III. The Evolution of a “Discovery Community”: From “Buy, Buy, Buy” to “Create, Create, Create”
None of this is accidental.
From last year’s Xiaohongshu Independent Developer Competition to this year’s hackathon, I’ve clearly sensed a powerful, accumulating, and evolving innovation momentum. Xiaohongshu is transforming from a lifestyle community into AI-era innovation infrastructure—almost like an “App Store for the AI era.”
Xiaohongshu began by helping people answer “What should I buy?” Through countless authentic user reviews, it built a strong “trust” network. That trust naturally extended beyond shopping decisions into travel, food, fitness, learning—and every facet of life—making Xiaohongshu the go-to decision hub for “how to live.”
Now, a more fundamental creativity is emerging here. As tens of thousands of developers begin treating Xiaohongshu as their primary innovation ground, the platform’s value dimension expands once again—now tackling deeper questions: “What should we create?” and “How should we create it?”
First, for AI-era creators, technology itself is becoming commoditized and standardized. The cost of calling a large-model API keeps falling, while deep human understanding and sharp insight into niche scenarios have become the scarcest, most valuable resources.
Xiaohongshu’s 350 million monthly active users generate massive volumes of rants, pleas, and shares daily—forming a vivid, diverse library of real-world demand scenarios. Developers no longer need to guess what users want; they simply “lurk” in relevant notes and comment sections to hear the most authentic voices. Their initial concepts and wireframes can immediately undergo real-world “echo location”—validating demand, pre-testing products, and even building brand awareness and cultivating potential users from Day One of creation.
Second, traditional software development faces hurdles at every step—finding talent, raising funds, acquiring traffic. Xiaohongshu offers a seamless 0-to-1 loop: discover a real need, find like-minded collaborators through sharing, launch your first note for a cold start—and even attract investor attention through community influence. The entire innovation chain can unfold openly and cost-effectively within this single community.
Third, the community’s “co-creation” culture. On Xiaohongshu, “Build in Public” isn’t a solo developer act—it’s a duet with users. Users aren’t passive consumers but active co-creators, promoters, and advocates. They offer suggestions, generate content, and spread the word organically for products they love.
Xiaohongshu’s foundational logic rests on “people” and “trust.” When this deeply cultivated community trust meets the innovation demands of the AI era, it unleashes astonishing energy—giving space for small, beautiful innovations born from real life to take root, sprout, and thrive.
This is an ever-evolving “symbiotic” story: it once coexisted with new consumption and lifestyle content; today, it chooses symbiosis with the new generation of AI Builders. It’s precisely this resonance with frontier creators that enables the platform to craft a new narrative for the AI era—and forms its enduring moat.
Looking back a decade, the mobile internet wave birthed a generation of entrepreneurial heroes. They seized the红利 of smartphone proliferation, connecting online and offline through apps—and reshaped how people eat, dress, live, and travel. It was an era of channels and platforms, where innovation centered on capturing major user needs, seizing entry points via scenarios, and competing fiercely on execution to build winner-take-all platforms.
Today, AI brings a new wave. This generation of Gen Z—and even Gen Alpha—entrepreneurs faces opportunities and challenges starkly different from their predecessors. The old story—of chasing hundreds of millions of users amid mobile-internet growth—no longer applies. But AI’s productivity explosion means they no longer need millions in funding before launching. A single super-individual, empowered by AI productivity, or a small team, can already build great products.
So the world’s “resolution” has risen: delivering better services to fewer users can yield higher lifetime value (LTV). Their weapons for innovation thus shift toward precise demand capture, extreme insight into niche scenarios—even radical self-expression through aesthetics—and the community cohesion enabled by “public building.”
As the logic and environment of entrepreneurship change—and individual creation becomes mainstream—a platform like Xiaohongshu, teeming with vivid individuals and authentic demands, becomes the ideal soil for this transformation. It’s evolving from a consumption-decision platform into AI-era innovation infrastructure—where micro-innovations and sparks of inspiration from individuals flow, collide, and validate with maximum efficiency.
This represents both a tremendous opportunity—and a profound responsibility—for Xiaohongshu as a community. I sincerely hope events like this hackathon multiply. Because this isn’t merely about keeping a platform’s vibe fresh and timely—it fundamentally shapes what meaningful value Xiaohongshu can bring to the world.
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