A 95-year-old village chief, Zhang Guifang, is bringing warmth to left-behind elderly residents and children as the Spring Festival approaches. She walks through the villages, offering to take "family portraits" for them. When she presses the shutter, the viewfinder might show an empty space, but when the elderly see the result, the photo is filled with a complete,团圆 family. "They weren't there when you took the picture, how are they all here now?" puzzled villagers ask. Zhang Guifang simply replies, "I have magic."
Zhang Guifang is the village chief of Sanjia Village in Hebi, Henan. Seeing that the left-behind elderly and children in the village yearn for family reunions that are difficult to achieve, she took the initiative. Using AI technology, she creates family portraits for the villagers. Technological advancement is making grassroots work increasingly warm and efficient. By simply opening the Baidu Miaoda Family Portrait Generator, uploading photos taken on-site and images of absent family members, a complete family portrait can be synthesized with one click.
"Technology cannot fill all voids, but goodwill can illuminate every corner of longing," Zhang Guifang believes. She sees technology not as a cold pile of techniques, but as a tool empowered and given warmth by善意. With the popularization and simplification of AI technology, the ability of village cadres to handle practical problems has greatly increased, turning them into "multi-armed" super-workers.
Beyond family portrait applications, many users on the Miaoda platform are utilizing AI to create various fun applications such as "Skill Mahjong," "New Year Poster Generation," and "Gesture Red Packet Receiving." These趣味 applications are simple, festive, and full of holiday spirit. Effects that once required professional programming skills or even a technical team can now be achieved by ordinary individuals as tools to showcase creativity, implement ideas, and even realize low-cost entrepreneurial dreams—all accomplished by a single person "handcrafting" them.
The phrase "one person is a team" reflects how the proliferation of AI technology is spurring the "handcrafted economy." The term "handcrafted" originally came from gaming circles, describing the completion of difficult operations or tasks without shortcuts, cheats, or辅助 tools. As AI technology matures, tasks that once required professional equipment or production lines can now be accomplished through AI operations, relying merely on manual effort for creative production—thus giving rise to the concepts of OPC (One-Person Company) and the "super individual."
AI-powered super individuals have significantly lowered the barrier to realizing personal creativity. Young people proficient in digital technology are shining brightly across various industries with agility and flexibility.
Zhang Guifang, with her warm heart, always seeks to do good and practical things for the villagers. As early as 2023, she wanted to fulfill the wishes of the left-behind elderly and children but was unable to coordinate suitable resources at the time. A simple photo activity is not easy to organize in the complex context of rural life. It required coordinating with professional photographers or spending considerable time and effort on photo editing, needing someone skilled in PS—moreover, heavy editing marks were easily noticeable to the elderly.
She held onto this wish until 2025, when AI technology became highly mature, offering outstanding results with extreme simplicity, finally allowing her to弥补 this regret. For instance, the Miaoda platform she skillfully uses is China's first conversational codeless AI development platform. As a product of deep integration between artificial intelligence and no-code development technology, it uses natural language interaction as its core entry point, breaking down traditional programming barriers. It allows ordinary people with no coding background to describe their needs through everyday conversation, enabling the platform to intelligently handle the entire process of application planning, development, testing, and deployment, achieving a zero-threshold development experience of "generating an app with one sentence."
Based on voice-input needs, Miaoda analyzes the shooting scene and atmosphere, seamlessly integrating absent family members into the family portrait naturally. With one person shooting and instant results, Zhang Guifang works like magic, compositing relatives who cannot return home into the photos, allowing every family to have a整齐 Spring Festival ritual.
Furthermore, as the Spring Festival approaches, many users on the Miaoda platform have created various festive applications through the AI Master Contest, including "Skill Mahjong," "New Year Poster Generation," and "Gesture Red Packet Receiving." Miaoda has also specially set up a New Year section to集中 host and display these creative applications.
In the past, developing an application required professional programming knowledge, long development cycles, and significant financial investment, burying countless ordinary ideas behind technical barriers. Now, with Miaoda's no-code development capability, both the efficiency needs of creators and the entertainment ideas of young people can be quickly met. This ability to satisfy even the smallest needs is giving rise to a large number of "handcrafted economy" entrepreneurs.
In rural areas, a 95-year-old village chief, relying solely on an AI tool, can accomplish work that previously required several roles like photographers and PS editors. Similar instances are emerging widely. On short video platforms, the topic of "handcrafting everything" has garnered billions of views: netizens combine foam rollers and motors to create smart massage chairs for cross-border sales; "Harry Potter" fans craft "magic wands" to control smart home devices. Even ideas like " Workplace Stress Reliever" and "Handcrafted Rockets" provide emotional value to netizens while enabling individuals to transition from hobbies to zero-threshold entrepreneurship.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the handcrafted economy. The boundaries AI applications can break through are already pervasive, beyond the imagination of ordinary netizens. For example, addressing issues like poor brushing habits in children, weak awareness of cavity risk prevention, and lack of professional dental guidance for parents, an app called "Snail Ya Ya" focuses on children's oral health, offering diversified dental care services and experiential content. It helps children establish scientific dental habits and provides parents with professional support for managing children's oral health, aiming to reduce cavity risks and protect oral health.
Another app, named "Age Gap Relationship倾向 Assessment," helps users quickly understand their romantic preferences through four assessment dimensions, offering科学 and precise references. The commonality of these two apps is that they don't require programmers to write code line by line; instead, they are generated with one click on Baidu Miaoda.
Baidu's "Miaoda" is a leading domestic "no-code application development platform." Leveraging large model technology, it makes app development simple and efficient: creating apps through "conversation" is intuitive and easy to understand. App construction can be completed within five minutes, breaking technical barriers and enabling everyone to become a "developer." Without any programming background, customized applications can be quickly created through natural language dialogue in just five minutes, truly achieving "zero-threshold" development.
Scholars analyze that handcrafting is essentially a distributed, low-cost, efficient, and flexible micro-innovation experiment. As an emerging economic form, it centers on individual creativity, leveraging AI tools and modular intelligent manufacturing platforms to significantly lower the innovation threshold, providing a starting point for entrepreneurship for digitally skilled youth and "slash" individuals.
Beyond "Snail Ya Ya" and the relationship assessment app, various creative applications are everywhere. For instance, "Quick Explore AI Novel" tackles creators' lack of inspiration and inefficiency, helping content creators achieve the goal of producing one full-length novel per day, making creative profitability attainable. There's also the "AI Prompt Assistant - Optimization Master" adapted for all AI creation scenarios, "Code Pain Car" meeting the creative needs of young people, the entertaining mini-game "Five-Claw Divine Dragon," and the New Year section applications like Skill Mahjong, poster generation, and gesture red packets.
These applications, developed by ordinary users on Miaoda, cover various细分 scenarios including daily life, parenting, creation, and entertainment. Behind each app is the fulfillment of a niche demand, the realization of an ordinary creator's idea, and a vivid manifestation of the handcrafted economy in the AI era.
With no-code application development platforms completing their transformation into "infrastructure," the OPC concept is gaining持续 momentum in entrepreneurial and tech circles. More individual developers, content creators, and even cross-industry practitioners are adopting a "one-person team" model to complete product development, launch, and operation. From efficiency tools to content platforms and vertical scenario applications, "one person making a product" is shifting from isolated cases to a replicable model.
In Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei, a hub for AI hardware, ten traditional incubators have been upgraded to OPC incubators, offering about 200 OPC workstations and 50 independent offices. Meanwhile, centralized incubation carriers, represented by the Renaissance Century Building, are accelerating. Nearly 10,000 square meters of space will focus on building high-standard OPC innovation communities, open to global makers, providing comprehensive support for office space, R&D, and experimentation, aiding the transformation of "handcrafted" ideas into industrialization and scale.
In Qingdao, Shandong, the Qingdao Solo AI Entrepreneur Platform was launched in January 2026. Based on the "Solo + AI" new entrepreneurship model, it integrates core elements like computing power, data, and technology to build a deeply integrated innovation system. Additionally, Hangzhou introduced the "Shangcheng District OPC Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Cultivation Three-Year Action Plan," and Suzhou released the "Suzhou City Artificial Intelligence OPC Cultivation and Development Action Plan (2025-2028)." Local governments are quickly捕捉 this innovative trend, strengthening policy support for "one-person companies" and "super individuals."
On December 16, 2025, at the Miaoda 2025 Creator Conference, Baidu announced that the platform had cumulatively generated over 500,000 commercial applications, with a daily growth rate of new applications exceeding 150%, covering over 200 scenarios, and creating cumulative value exceeding 5 billion yuan. The "Creator Dream-Building Plan" was launched, aiming to help one million creators generate income over the next three years.
Data shows that 81% of Miaoda users are non-programmers, primarily consisting of职场 professionals and university groups. Applications generated by Miaoda have cumulatively served over 10 million users, with nearly 100,000 people using these apps daily to solve real problems.
Commercially, Miaoda's applications mainly manifest in three forms: first, direct monetization tools like e-commerce mini-programs and mini-games, spawning numerous "one-person companies"; second, business software helping frontline personnel build internal systems at low cost, reducing corporate reliance on R&D resources; third, AI efficiency applications落地 generative AI into learning, work, and life scenarios. It is disclosed that these three types of applications have collectively created economic and efficiency value exceeding 5 billion yuan.
No-code application generation tools, represented by Baidu Miaoda, are helping ordinary people quickly transition from idea to application prototype, covering product generation, function combination, capability invocation, and continuous iteration, significantly reducing the technical门槛 and time成本 for individual developers.