Meituan will open up its AI programming capabilities and launch a new product NoCode｜Intelligent Emergence Exclusive

The implementation of Meituan’s AI strategy has been further accelerated.

"Intelligence Emergence" has exclusively learned that Meituan will officially launch an AI programming tool "NoCode" in the near future, positioning it in the direction of Vibe Coding.

"Intelligence Emergence" observed that in early May, one of Meituan's corporate entities registered a new domain name called "nocode.cn". After entering the domain name, it can be found that the product has entered the grayscale test.

"Intelligence Emergence" learned that "NoCode" was developed by Meituan's R&D quality and efficiency team, which belongs to Meituan's basic R&D platform.

AI programming has become a hot AI startup direction since 2024. Products such as Cursor and Devin have been popular all over the world. The mainstream routes in this track can be divided into two types. One is assisted programming. Typical products are Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt, Lovable, etc., which require humans to complete most of the work with the assistance of AI; there are also products that are more inclined to autonomous programming, such as Devin. AI plays a leading role in programming, and humans are mainly responsible for grasping the general direction of the task.

In China, almost all major companies have entered the field of AI programming and launched corresponding products, such as Alibaba's Tongyi Lingma, Byte's Trae, and Baidu's Wenxin Kuai Code.

According to a person from Meituan's technical system, NoCode's product positioning is closer to the recent star AI product Lovable, an AI programming application that is mainly for non-technical people and adopts conversational interaction. Users only need to have multiple rounds of conversations with the model to allow it to automatically complete different coding tasks and complete subsequent deployment. Typical application scenarios include data analysis, product prototypes, operation tools, portal website generation, etc.

However, NoCode will optimize more proprietary tasks, especially the reasoning side. An insider said that NoCode uses the Code Agent architecture, which can perform multi-step logical reasoning. For example, AI will schedule operations such as file retrieval, log analysis, and database query.

As for why an AI Agent product was launched at this time, people close to the NoCode team said that Meituan hopes to open this product to merchants and a wider user group, helping everyone to complete related tasks as easily as ordering takeout, lowering the IT and digitalization threshold for small and medium-sized merchants, and allowing users to experience the efficiency improvement and innovative fun brought by AI technology. In the future, Meituan also plans to gradually open up other AI products within the company.

In this wave of big-model AI, Meituan has been low-key in the past two years, with little exposure. It was not until the DeepSeek craze in early 2025 that Meituan's AI business was stimulated. In the Meituan earnings conference call in March, Meituan CEO Wang Xing talked about AI strategy for the first time.

In fact, Meituan’s investment in big models was not too late. The self-developed big model LongCat, which Wang Xing first disclosed at the earnings conference, actually began to be developed in 2023.

In addition, Meituan also invested in Zhipu, one of the "Six Little Tigers" of the big model, very early, and launched the AI ​​social companion product Wow in 2023. By 2024, Meituan's core products also launched a number of AI functions, such as the AI ​​takeaway assistant "Ask Xiaodai".

The launch of NoCode is also in line with Wang Xing’s latest AI strategy. Wang Xing once said that Meituan’s AI strategy is based on three levels:

• AI at work, which mainly applies AI to the work and operations of all employees;

• AI in products: using AI to transform existing 2B and 2C products and services and create new AI-native products;

• And Building LLM (Large Language Model), actively investing in Capex (capital expenditure), and improving the ability of self-developed base model.

Among these three aspects, the self-developed large model has been disclosed at the earnings conference. As for "AI in products", in addition to NoCode, Meituan also disclosed an AI native product initiated by Meituan's core local business CEO Wang Puchong, which is currently in the development process, and its vision is "everyone can have an exclusive life secretary."

Intelligence Emergence learned that Meituan’s management has also been focusing on NoCode’s “AI at work”, such as requiring leaders at all levels to apply for and use AI efficiency-enhancing tools, and to frequently share application cases and issues that require iteration internally.

People familiar with the matter told "Intelligence Emergence" that Meituan's investment in the field of AI programming can be traced back to the beginning of 2023, and NoCode is a project incubated by Meituan's internal AI hackathon. At the beginning, this product first served Meituan's internal R&D needs.

It is reported that the internal version of NoCode has connected some of Meituan’s internal data and technical systems and entered the work scenarios of Meituan’s various business lines. Some product and field sales personnel have been able to use this product to develop product prototypes, applications, etc. to meet the long-tail needs of internal business or small and medium-sized businesses.

In addition to NoCode, Meituan has also developed another more professional AI development tool, CatPaw, which is comparable to Cursor and other AI programming tools for developers, but CatPaw is currently mainly open to internal users.

Judging from the results, AI has indeed significantly improved Meituan’s operations and work efficiency.

In its financial report, Meituan said that 27% of the company’s new code was generated by AI. Now this number has increased again - an insider told Intelligence Emergence that after the launch of another programming tool, CatPaw, Meituan’s internal R&D personnel accounted for more than 80% of the weekly activity; of the new code added each week, about 50% was generated by AI.

The insider revealed that NoCode is the first step for Meituan's AI at work capabilities to spill over. The shift from internal to external is also, to some extent, a confirmation of Meituan's accelerated AI strategy.

After the March earnings conference, Meituan clearly began to work hard and fast. On the one hand, it increased its recruitment of AI talents. Wang Puchong even directly recruited people for the AI ​​native product team on social media.

It can be predicted that after Meituan opens up its AI programming capabilities, the competition in this field will intensify again.