Written by Aditya Arya.
The Barriers Have Collapsed. Now What?
6 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
Written by Aditya Arya.
6 min read · Part of Sponsoring students at AIE became a test of Singapore's AI ambition
This article was first published by e27.
I wrote this on a Sunday night. Tomorrow morning I am back in Pasir Laba Camp, waking up before dawn for another day of SCS Infantry Pro Term, one of the most physically and mentally demanding courses in the Singapore Armed Forces. This weekend, I spent three days at AI Engineer Singapore, sitting in the front row next to a Cabinet Minister, speaking with the Head of Design at Cursor, and having a conversation backstage with a researcher and builder that lasted an hour and a half and changed how I think about the future of software.
I am not a computer science student. I have not started university. I am eighteen years old, in full-time national service, and I spent my weekend building and learning at one of the most significant AI conferences to happen in this country.
That is not a brag. It is a data point. And I think it matters.
On the first morning of AI Engineer Singapore, Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan stood on stage and said something I have not been able to stop thinking about since.
He described building his own AI second brain. Not having one built for him. Not being briefed on one. Building it himself, on his own machine, with his own hands, because he believed you cannot govern a technology you have only been briefed on. And then he said it plainly: the barriers have collapsed.
A sitting Cabinet Minister. Decades in government. An ophthalmologist by training. Building AI tools on a Raspberry Pi at home because he understood that the only way to lead this moment is to be inside it.
If that does not tell you something about where Singapore is heading, I do not know what will.
The line stayed with me for the rest of the conference, not because it was inspiring in the way conference lines are supposed to be inspiring, but because it was true in a way that most people have not caught up to yet. The thing that used to separate people who could build from people who could not was technical knowledge. That gap is closing faster than most institutions are prepared to admit. What remains is judgment. Curiosity. The willingness to actually try.
The conversation that changed me most did not happen on stage.
It happened backstage, with Geoffrey Huntley, after his session on the future of software companies. What started as a brief introduction became an hour and a half of the most honest thinking I have encountered about what AI is doing not just to how we write code, but to how organisations themselves will be structured. His argument, simplified but not distorted, was that the software factory model is not a distant possibility. It is already beginning. And the generation that will navigate it most effectively is the one that understands both the human systems and the technical ones.
That conversation mattered to me because it was not abstract. It was about the world I am about to enter. And it was the kind of conversation I did not think I would be able to have at eighteen, in NS, without a degree or a title or a company behind my name.
But I was in the room. And that changed everything.
Ryo Lu, Head of Design at Cursor, gave a talk about designing the next version of Cursor that reframed how I think about the role of design in an AI world.
His central argument was a distinction between what he called the black box and the glass. The black box model of AI tells you to type and forget. It skips the thinking, removes your ability to intervene, and leaves you with a product built for the model, not for the human. Glass is the opposite. It starts simple, thinks together with you, brings clarity, keeps you in control, and builds your intuition over time.
His closing line was the one that landed hardest: as AI gets more powerful, glass matters more.
I spoke with him after the session. He talked about how the designers who will matter in the next decade are not the ones who can generate the most, but the ones who can judge the best. The ones who know what good feels like before the model produces it. The ones who bring an opinion into the room.
That is a design philosophy. But it is also an argument about what education should be producing right now and largely is not.
Sara Hooker, co-founder of Adaption Labs, launched AutoScientist three days before speaking at this conference. Her talk and the conversation we had backstage were about something most people in the AI space are not ready to sit with: that the era of improvement through scale alone is ending.
She is not a pessimist about this. She is building the alternative. But her argument matters for anyone starting out right now, which is that the next chapter of AI will belong to people who understand how models actually learn, not just what they can do. The builders who will lead are the ones who can think about the feedback loop between data, model, and real-world use. Not the ones with the biggest compute budget.
For a eighteen-year-old in Singapore with no lab, no budget, and no CS degree, that framing is not discouraging. It is the most encouraging thing I heard all weekend.
There is a version of this article that concludes with something safe. Something about Singapore’s potential, the importance of community, the value of showing up.
I am not going to write that version.
Here is what I actually think.
Singapore has the infrastructure, the policy environment, the government will, and the geographic positioning to be a serious player in the global AI ecosystem. What it has historically lacked is a builder culture that starts early, moves fast, and does not wait for permission. The older model was: finish school, finish NS, get a degree, get a job, then maybe build something.
That model is over. Dr Balakrishnan said the barriers have collapsed. Ryo Lu is shipping Cursor’s next generation of design tools from inside the product, not from a design file. Sara Hooker left a VP title at a billion-dollar company to start from zero because she believed the consensus was wrong.
The signal from every person I spoke with this weekend was the same, even when they said it in different words. The credential is no longer the entry point. The work is.
I am an Infantry soldier in SCS Pro Term. I spent last weekend at an AI conference. I won a hackathon solo in an hour before NS. I am writing this on a Sunday night before a 5am wake-up.
I am not saying this to perform effort. I am saying it because I think the next generation of builders in Singapore needs to hear it plainly: you do not need to wait until your life is set up perfectly to start building seriously.
The barriers have collapsed.
What you do with that is the only question that matters now.