2026 KakaoPay Kafe-Gaepe On-Site Sketch: A Developer Festival with AI

This year's 2026 Kafe-Gaepe was not just an internal tech event, but a festival designed around AI to help colleagues communicate more enjoyably and experience KakaoPay's own tech culture firsthand.

From the preparation stage, 10 members of the operations crew took part together, carefully revisiting feedback from past surveys. In particular, they addressed challenges such as improving goods and prizes, expanding networking time among developers, and enhancing the venue environment, strengthening both networking and content tailored to technical roles.

This year's theme was Wave Rider (Surfer). Rather than stepping back in the face of the massive change that is AI, the visuals and overall program embodied the attitude of KakaoPay developers grabbing their boards and diving into the wave.

The program consisted of five main pillars.

• AI Session: Ian from the Core Platform Team gave a talk titled "Catching Up on the Latest AI Development Tools, Centered on Claude Code," covering a wide range of topics including MCP, Skills, Sub-agents, prompt structuring, and security precautions.
• Networking: Crew members interested in AI gathered to freely share the latest use cases and challenges.
• Online Participatory Games: A game that reverse-engineers prompts from images, along with an online escape room based on the KakaoPay universe, lowered the barrier to participation while boosting the fun factor.
• Demo Stations: Run as a stamp tour format where technology was demonstrated using laptops instead of slides, allowing participants to closely experience the tech stacks and adoption cases of other teams.
• Main Session: Featured a retrospective on 2025 and plans for 2026, growth analysis based on development data, QuickPloy, an innovation in deployment productivity, and a case study of a 10x productivity boost from the internal AI project Luminous.

The details were also tailored to crew tastes. Custom keycap goods carrying a sensibility exclusive to technical roles, along with the trendy snack Dujjonkku, received great responses and heightened engagement with the event.

The results were clear as well. Participation among technical roles reached 77%, up 6%p from the previous year, and satisfaction scored 4.44 out of 5. The Main Session and Demo Stations were rated as the most informative programs, while venue congestion and the first-come-first-served game format remained as improvement points for next time.

Above all, this Kafe-Gaepe clearly showcased KakaoPay's culture of actively learning about and enjoying AI rather than fearing it, along with the energy of the operations crew and participating crew members who built that culture together.