JINAN -- A quiet yet profound shift is reshaping the landscape of China's digital economy. The startup cafe culture that once buzzed with activity during the smartphone boom is back, but this time it is artificial intelligence (AI) that is fueling a new wave of individual entrepreneurship.

The top ranks of the country's mobile app stores, long the exclusive domain of deep-pocketed tech giants, are now being breached by a new breed of software, namely simple, niche applications created by individual developers and tiny teams, often in a matter of hours.

A quintessential example is "Little Cat Fill Light," an app that recently topped China's app store paid charts. Its creator, Chen Yunfei, an economics graduate with some coding experience, spotted a specific demand on social media where users employed solid-color images as makeshift photo fill lights.

Using AI-powered programming tools, Chen built a working version in roughly one hour -- a feat he asserts would have required a full team and months of effort just a few years ago.

In recent months, homegrown large language models, such as Alibaba's Qwen3 and Zhipu AI's GLM series, have cultivated a devoted following among indie developers and geeks, thanks to their robust coding prowess. These tools are rapidly evolving from simple code generators into end-to-end development companions, capable of shipping production-ready software.

Dubbed the "handmade economy" across China's cyberspace, this grassroots movement has seen non-professional teams and solo operators achieve striking success. By leveraging next-generation AI assistants to dismantle once-daunting technical barriers, individual creators armed with little more than sharp market insight can now swiftly transform ideas into fully functional, polished products.

AI technology has also streamlined short drama production into a one-person job. "What once took a team over a month to complete now takes one person a month," said Qin Lin, CEO of Nanjing Sci&Tech Create Horizon. Nine of the startup's developers, armed with AI models, produced an 8-minute video clip in under 72 hours, with their product winning an AIGC film award in 2024.

Such micro-shorts are now hitting international markets, becoming viral sensations across multiple countries. Major Chinese tech firms including SenseTime, ByteDance and Kuaishou have launched paid AI tools for short drama creation.

This trend has extended beyond pure software. On video-sharing platforms, the viral hashtag "handmade everything" showcases everything from DIY movies and innovative robots to market-ready smart devices.

Sun Yingdong, from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, bridged his agile creativity with industrial discipline. After prototyping a smart massager, he used crowdfunding to finance mold costs and a move into standardized production, achieving annual sales of over 10,000 units.

In response, a pedestrian street in Huaqiangbei, a grand electronics bazaar in this city, is evolving. The recent establishment of a one-person-company (OPC) innovation community there provides lifecycle support for AI entrepreneurs, connecting individual innovators with hardware manufacturing chains, thereby effectively upgrading the entire ecosystem.

Local governments in the eastern Chinese cities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou are also establishing OPC incubation zones, enabling a single individual armed with AI tools to handle everything from content production and product operations to service delivery.

"The most significant advantage of this model lies in cost control and decision-making efficiency," said Li Xiaolei, an analyst from the Guangdong provincial investigation and research center.

"OPCs are transforming solo creators into 'super individuals' capable of operating at scale," said Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He predicts that this model will emerge as a significant pillar of the digital economy within the next five years.

Ding Chunfa, CEO of iMakerbase, an innovation and entrepreneurship incubator founded in Shenzhen, noted that digital-native creators, big-tech executives with commercial networks and scientists developing promising projects have emerged as the main protagonists of this entrepreneurial wave.

The grassroots movement represents a wave of experimentation characterized by distributed, low-cost innovation and maximum agility, said Liu Yiming, an associate professor of economics at east China's Shandong University.

"It lowers the barriers to entry for digitally-savvy youth with keen market instincts, and is poised to emerge as a vital complement to traditional employment within the platform economy," said Liu.

Additionally, against a backdrop of the AI monetization bottleneck, OPCs hold the potential to unlock new consumption scenarios and stimulate domestic market demand, Liu added.