Vercel's Guillermo Rauch on AI and the Future of Coding - Ep. 47

I think a lot of developers are probably thinking, okay, is it even worth it to be able to code right now?

I don't think I would identify today even as a coder, even though that's what I obsessed about for years since I'm like 10 years old. Trend has been away from the implementation detail, which is the code, and towards the end goal, which is to deliver a great product or a great experience. One of our enterprise customers for v0 is a company that has been in the cloud space since the cloud was born, like literally like in the room where the cloud was invented. And they told me, we have it as a rule that we don't do code. They showed me their Slack conversations. It's just them sending V0s back and forth. There's no GitHub, there's no infra, there is no anything. There's just building products. When things are specific skills, machines tend to take them over over time. If your skill when you were a kid was like, I can do math in my head really well, awesome. Great asset to have. I love it. But also there's a specific machine that can do that skill also very well and even better than you. And so what I try to separate is what are the meta skills that are not as easily replicated by machines that you should still nurture? And I think those tend to be more around very high-level conceptual thinking. What's about to become possible? Yeah, that I can start cooking on now.

Guillermo, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So for people who don't know, you are the co-founder and CEO of Vercel. Uh, you're also the creator of Next and Socket.IO, um, which is very close to my heart. I told you when we met that, uh, uh, it was Socket.IO was the reason I could build my last company. So I appreciate all you've done for the developer ecosystem.

Just met some folks last night that said the same. It's, it's nice to recognition for open source. But I'm thankful to the people that maintain those projects.

Yeah. So we have a lot to talk about. I really, like, in general in this conversation, want to talk about the future of programming with AI. I want to talk about v0 and what you're doing with Vercel. But where I want to start is, I was, like, before this interview, I was thinking about, like, the kinds of things that it seems like you're interested in building and the kind of, like, taste that you have. And, um, and, and then think about how that might apply in this sort of AI era. And where I kind of came to—

and I'll admit Owen was involved a little bit, I was involved in the pre-production—

where what I kind of came to, to is it seems like you're very good at, um, playing at the edges of what's possible technically, um, looking for where there's like, um, something that's new and valuable, but like pragmatically valuable, but still pretty messy and then coming up with like a very clean opinionated zero config solution to it. So like I would put Socket.IO in that bucket. I put Next in that bucket. I think Vercel is in that bucket. So one is I'm curious if you feel like that's, that's kind of—

I mean, if Owen came up with that, it's, it's over. That's pretty good. Like I'll tell you, like it's funny. I was having a conversation with one of my coworkers the other day and I was giving them the example of Socket.IO as when I started the project, WebSocket, which is the underlying technology that later become a part of web browsers. For context, maybe everyone doesn't know about Socket.IO. It enables real-time chat, real-time communication. It powers websites like Perplexity. And when I created that developer tool, WebSocket was in its infancy. So to your point, you kind of want to identify the wave when it's just a little, a few drops of water, but you have that, you see that potential. It was also extremely messy. So being able to go from I want to do something with real time to I want to create an application, I think that's the vacuum that, or the huge gap that Socket.IO filled out. And with v0, I think we saw the same thing. So models became good at writing code. Specifically, they were very good at writing like being able to design with HTML and CSS and also writing React code. So even when GPT-3 was out, we started thinking about, well, this could be used for revolutionizing how design and code gets emitted, how the process of bringing an idea to life could be completely disrupted. But it was really early. So to your point, there's almost like a parallel between WebSocket was a draft of a specification when I started Socket.IO. And when we first thought about v0, models could barely be coherent in outputting code. But there was that promise. And I think, you know, you kind of want to ride those waves when they're early.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things is like, it feels like, so everything that you've done so far has been like very developer focused and it feels like you have your finger on the vibe of what developers want.

Well, I'll tell you something I don't think I've shared before, which is the company was called Zeit, and then we renamed it Vercel. And the reason I called it Zeit was a few things. One, I was obsessed with this idea that if you really want to capture developers, you need to capture the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is this idea of the collective conscious and how people are thinking about the future. And you need to really be on your toes because things change so quickly. The vibes change so quickly, right? Like you see this with models. Like one day one model is popular for developers, the next day it's another model. And another point was Zeit means time in German. And I was obsessed with this idea of real time with my background in Socket.IO. And what I thought is that the best way to build software would be in real time. And it has two meanings. One is real time in the sense of you're just typing and you're getting feedback instantaneously from the system. I think v0 is almost like the culmination of that idea. Interesting. Because you're literally chatting with the system and getting feedback in real time. But the other one was chatting with your customers, right? Getting feedback from the world and adapting. I sometimes joke that for early stage founders, Their job is to, you know, chat on X with our customers and prospects, get feedback, fix things, and put a ton of quality, craft, and taste into their products.

I want to stay with that idea of like zeitgeist or like paradigm or like having your finger on the pulse of something. Because I think one thing that's interesting is, you know, to come up with Socket.IO, to come up with Next, like you have to be developing stuff yourself all the time. Yeah. Realize that this is possible and that you want to make something. Yeah. Like it's so, it's too hard. So you need like a tool to help you do that more easily. And I'm curious how that has changed for you. Like, I don't know how much programming you're doing.

It really hasn't changed surprisingly. So like I mentioned earlier, one of my goals is to like enable Vercel to do a lot of what I did as an individual, like come up with those ideas, being able to bring them to life. And so one of the things that I mentioned is kind of inspiring our employees with like, well, you could build the next Socket.IO if you think about these principles. So I think a lot about principles that I can set for the company at large. And one of them is we're always customer zero. We dogfood our tools. We put product experiences before tools as well. I was just having a conversation with our tech lead for the AI SDK. So AI SDK is a really interesting project. It's becoming the number one framework in the JavaScript world for how you interact with AI models. So it's almost like the Socket.IO or Next.js of LLMs. But it didn't come out because I was excited about AI or I live in San Francisco and I saw a lot of billboards about AI. I was like, hmm, we should have an AI framework. What it came out of is us building AI products. So we're building a lot of really cool demos of how to use Next.js with AI. We're building v0, and we realize there's an opportunity to extract out the infrastructure of those AI products and then share them with the world. And so the operating principle here is you want to always put the product first, not the framework first. A framework in isolation without having that initial sort of patient zero it's never gonna be a good tool. And this actually came out of my fascination with how Meta put out React. So Next.js builds on the open source UI infrastructure that Meta open sourced. And what I noticed is that I kind of reverse engineer why I liked React and why I was impressed with it. And I remember it first started with their product. I would go to the Facebook newsfeed and all of the things that they were doing that were very real time, like the chat thing and the notifications badge, and it just felt snappy. I actually remember a specific moment when they announced that comments were going to start trickling in in real time. And I was like, that's hard because I built Socket.io. I was like, that's really hard at that scale. It's very impressive. And then I realized, okay, you ask yourself, okay, how did they build that? And this is actually something that a lot of people do unconsciously and is really good to tap into that sort of— it's almost like a primal instinct. When you see something good, you ask yourself, how did they build that? It's like when you walk into a studio and you're like, oh, I really like the vibe here. Well, the next thing you do— I mean, maybe not everybody, but like, I guess it's a very founder— the creative people, whatever, like we can call them, like, um, I wonder where they got that chair, and I wonder what fabric is this curtain. Totally. And so developers do this all the time. And so Start with the product. You almost don't need to promote the tool. Yeah. Because people are going to ask themselves like, all right, I want a product like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's how I still do it. Like I try to use our products, but I also am always on the lookout for like really good things and then reverse engineer how you get there.

Yeah, I've definitely found there's so much there to talk about. Like I've definitely found with Every, so we have the writing and then we build software products and a lot of the writing is about building new technology, new businesses.

It's like a marketing strategy in its own right.

Yeah. Like, honestly, like, the best marketing for our articles has been building great products because people are like, well, I want to know how they think about it. Totally. Which has been really, really cool. And the other interesting thing that I think is, is sort of, um, it's your ethos and it's also, I think, uniquely valuable right now is like the sort of dogfooding ethos. We do that too because I feel like AI sort of, um, it changes the landscape where there's still, there's now a ton of low-hanging fruit of things to build because like there's a new technology paradigm. Um, and so you can just like wave a stick around and just think about like, okay, what are all the things that I want? And probably someone has not built that in a good way yet. Whereas like, I don't know, 3 years ago at the apex of the B2B SaaS wave, like all the low-hanging fruit.

Yeah, there was a saturation. And that's what you see when there's a platform shift. Yeah. AI is a new platform. And when a new platform emerges, it's, it's kind of hard to even estimate how many new applications will emerge. I remember the early days of the iPhone. It wasn't clear to people that it was the new platform. Yeah. In fact, it launched and there was kind of a hint that there could be apps of your own in that home screen. But it actually took quite a few years for people to be like, yeah, this is the platform. We have to, we have to claim a square in that home screen grid.

Yeah.

Not obvious at all. And I think you can think of AI as almost like another new— it's a new home screen. And right now there's a handful of icons on that home screen. There is ChatGPT. Uh, you could, you know, you could have like Google AI Overviews, Perplexity. And the question you should be asking yourself is like, how many more of those are there going to be in it? And my guess is probably millions. Yeah. And so very exciting time for especially small teams like yours to be thinking about what are my pains that AI can answer.

Yeah, I want to go back to the thing you said earlier about sort of transitioning from maybe like in the Socket.io days, you have your finger on the pulse and you're the one who's solving your own problem to thinking about how do I enable an entire organization of people to think that way? So you're more like thinking about the principles underneath that mode of thinking and then trying to infuse that in the culture. Yeah. Um, tell me about how that process has been for you personally. Like, do you like that versus like actually coding a lot? Or like, yeah, tell me about that transition.

Yeah, it's awesome. So I believe that there is seasons of a startup's life. Yeah. And in the early days you need to be obsessed with getting a high quality product out into the world and you live and die by product market fit. Mm-hmm. I think at some point you start realizing that you have it and there's other things to build. To operationalize that product-market fit, to make it into a machine. Right. And I would say like that's a transition between a startup and a scale-up. And think, and I think when you're a scale-up, whatever that term means, but I guess like a larger, more mature startup, you realize that you no longer live or die by one individual product-market fit. You're probably thinking about becoming a platform or you are a platform and you're thinking about multiple products. And so you start becoming more of a machine that outputs products. You're like essentially a Y Combinator in the initial recursive sense. Yeah. And when you're creating a machine, you still apply a lot of the thinking that you apply when you design products. It's only that the company itself is the product. Right. And you're still worried about all the things that you worry about when you want to create excellent products. For example, onboarding. If you're gonna be hiring a ton of people, what do you want to have? You want to have an excellent onboarding experience, right? Just like when you first start using a new app. When people join Vercel, they need to be equipped with everything they need to succeed. So you start thinking about other aspects of the company. I think principles are kind of like the sort of like product specifications of your company. And so thinking about What are our values? What are our ethos? What is our mission? What are the right people to pursue this mission? In terms of like that recursive product generation machine, I think a lot about what I call recursive founder mode. So there's founder mode. I believe founder mode fundamentally doesn't scale in the sense of if your aspirations are very large, the total output and creative output of a company cannot just be limited to the founder.

Right.

And so especially when you start having those ambitions of like being a company that can nurture new founders within it. And so I think a lot about what is the DNA that we can incorporate into the company that is almost like the people that would start a company on their own. Yeah. But they can actually kind of do that within Vercel. And so we select for specific traits, we offer very unique things. So we build a lot of cool open source technologies. People know us for Next.js, but we also contribute to Svelte, which is a very popular web framework. We created or we acquired initially, but we support a tool called TurboRepo that helps companies to scale huge codebases to the size of Google and Facebook. So people can come to Vercel to fulfill their dreams to reach millions of developers through open source. And so those are kind of the things that I think a lot about. How could I find not just the next Socket.IO, but how could I create the environment that creates Socket.IOs and Next.js and the ecosystems around it?

I think that's really interesting. And the reason I'm keying on that journey from doing it yourself to making the machine that builds the products is it's sort of this journey of moving up the layer, moving up layers of abstraction in an organization. And totally, and I'm like, what I want to talk to you about is sort of the, um, the future of developers, uh, in an AI world. And I think that there's something similar happening in, in some aspects of, of being a developer where, um, you know, Cora, for example, we have this email product that I demoed for you, and Kieran, who built Cora, he didn't write like 80% of that code, right?

He knows how it works.

Yeah, like 80 to 90% of it was like written by Owen or Claude. And I think that's a very similar upleveling journey, right? Where the AI is actually typing the stuff and you're thinking about what are the principles and what's the architecture that you want it to write? Yeah. Talk to me about that.

Yeah. One thing that immediately comes to mind is that it does seem like people are becoming full-stack product builders. I don't think I would identify today even as a coder, even though that's what I obsessed about for years. Since I'm like, since I was like 10 years old, my ego and my identity became tied up with I code. That's my thing. And yet I think what I was lucky to have is also that aspiration to build products. And that's what allowed for things like Socareo to happen because it was like, I just want to make the web more real-time and more interactive. I had like a product idea in mind that wasn't just like only in the code. I think that's an important asset to have. And when I look at people at Vercel today, I've been noticing that they're just more full stack. They, with v0, for example, they can do design. They can bring context, data, copywriting into their creations that otherwise would have required chatting with other people and crowdsourcing ideas. So We are going into a world where coding is a specific skill. And when things are specific skills, machines tend to take them over over time. If your skill when you were a kid was like, I can do math in my head really well. Awesome. Great asset to have. I love it. But also there's a specific machine that can do that skill also very well and even better than you. Yeah. And so what I try to separate is what are the meta skills? That are not as easily replicated by machines that you should still nurture. And I think those tend to be more around very high-level conceptual thinking. Your engineer who, you know, automated the production of that product to like an 80% degree, he still has a very good understanding of how all the concepts relate. Yeah, he can prompt the right things to the AI. It's not that he just was like, okay, O6, please build me this thing, and then you just checked out and went on vacation. So the concept of symbolic systems comes to mind a lot for me because it transcends language, runtime, framework, coding. And that's extremely important to have. How things work and relate to one another. Interestingly enough, it's a skill that VCs kind of nurture a lot because I've been in rooms with a lot of venture capitalists that play by ear, and you can tell that they play by ear because they have— and by the way, this is a skill in its own right, and it's very impressive. They have extreme, what I would call token breath. I'm using token in the sense of LLM. They know 30 companies for the space of continuous testing, and they know 50 for LLM pre-training models. And that skill actually is super helpful when you're prompting. Yeah. Because you understand how the concepts relate to one another. You can point the agent to use a specific technology that might be the right solution. Yeah. But you're not actually doing the coding. And so that's, I think, the biggest step that's going to play out in the ecosystem.

Yeah, I think that I love the idea of meta skills. And sort of one of those being like, okay, how do things fit together? How can I be a little bit more full stack? How do I think about things from end to end? Another thing that I've been playing around with is like, I have this whole idea of us moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy where you're in a knowledge economy, you're compensated based on what you know. And an allocation economy, you're compensated based on how you allocate the resources of intelligence and that the skills in that economy that are valuable are the skills of human managers today. So like an example, which I think is kind of interesting because I think a lot of developers are probably thinking, okay, is it even worth it to be able to code right now? And I think like when you think about being a manager, let's say being a technical manager, you always have to, there's this line between, okay, am I going to be in the details and know everything and micromanage? Or am I going to completely check out and like just let them do whatever they want basically? And Both options are bad and you have to be able to know, okay, when is it important to be in the details and when is it important to just delegate? But in order to do that, you kind of have to know the underlying skill. It's very hard to know that if you're not technical.

I love this concept, by the way. The idea that you're allocating resources and delegating to these agents is already happening. One of the things I think is really, really interesting So Vercel has two parts broadly. One is our managed infrastructure. We basically host websites. Mm-hmm. We deliver them through a global CDN network. We make it so easy for developers to deploy and build, et cetera. And that has a usage-based model. So for example, we host underarmor.com and openai.com. If they have more traffic, uh, Vercel costs more for them. And if they have zero traffic, it costs nothing. Which is awesome. On the other hand, we have v0, which is more like a design engineer tool in the sense almost as like VS Code or Figma would be, and almost like if they had a child. And those products you typically pay by subscription, not by usage. I think AI is actually disrupting that, and it goes back to that idea of allocation. So I'll tell you a great example.. You have users that are draining AI tokens and running these GPUs super hot day in and day out. They're like AI-powered engineers. And there's users who use it in a more casual way. They're like, oh, I'm on my phone, I want to create a personal app, I'm going to use v0. And what happens is that at the end of the day, we're seeing the first category of apps, I think, that are tools that have a consumption billing model attached to them. Because what you're doing is not— you're not simply using it as a system of record. It's not like Salesforce. You're actually setting machines in motion to perform tasks. And I like that metaphor is it's almost like you're doing management in capital allocation. Okay, how much computation am I going to allocate to perform this given task? And you even have to think about risk., right? Because it's true that AI is really exciting and capable, but sometimes it's not that capable, right? So you have to think about, am I going to burn lots of inference time compute? Am I going to set this entire 500 billion data center on fire to try to solve this task and actually don't know if the AI will perform?

Is this on the customer side or on the—

It's on the customer side. So the user of AI will have to think almost as if they were a cloud infrastructure user. I think it's a leap that is maybe the closest thing to that in today's sort of product development world would be CI/CD, where a given engineer can say, okay, I'm going to run 100 machines to test my program. But it's a lot less fluid. It's a lot less elastic than this kind of thing where you can sit down and say, okay, 5 agents, go at it. Yeah. And it might or might not give you the right result. And so you have to think like a capital allocator and you have to think like a manager of these agents.

Yeah. What that makes me think of is like, yeah, in this world you're much more likely to— it makes much more sense to pay for tasks to be done. Yes. And for the price that you pay to reflect the level of risk that the task will get done well. 100%.

Which is like hiring any other human for that matter.

Exactly.

I go to Upwork and I'm like, I don't know if this is the person, right?

I don't know if this is the agent or this is the task.

Ask for this agent.

Exactly. Yeah. And then what that makes me think of is like, well, at that point, like, if you have a market where like different agents can bid from different companies to like do any particular task, that's like an actually really interesting market.

Yeah. Because I think also that we're going to see specialization in agents, that some will have better context, some will have better taste. A lot of that deals with like the post-training process. And so there is definitely a marketplace and a competition that happens in who is the right agent for this problem.

Yeah, I want to go back though to just you saying, I don't, I don't think of myself as a coder. I think that's so interesting. And, and also you serve developers, right? So where do you think that term goes over the next like 5 or 10 years?

Yeah, you know what's interesting? Coder as a word used to be more popular in my community.

Yeah.

And I think even before AI, people were starting to realize that their job was not just to introduce keystrokes into an IDE. There's a history of this. One example that I like to give is before automatic code formatting tools became popular, people used to care a lot about what their code looked like on the screen. How many columns? Are the words neatly aligned? People would have discussions about this. It was actually considered to be a productivity drain, but it was a huge subject of debate within companies. Now we look back and it's like, of course, people should not be discussing if the aesthetic arrangement of the code is right or not. And so people introduced this tool called the formatter. I think— I don't know who the exact project that popularized the most, but I remember when Golang came out of Google, it came with very simple code for automatic code formatting. And then in our community in JavaScript and TypeScript, Prettier came out. It's called Prettier because it makes your code pretty with no discussion, like objectively prettier. And then that whole category of quote unquote problem disappeared. And I would say, look, format— how your code is formatted, that, that felt appropriate to the word coder. It's just a person that like makes their entire purpose to like write code. And then we kind of, I think, developer, engineer, then product design, which is a role that sort of came out of Facebook, became more important. So the trend has been away from the implementation detail, which is the code. And towards the end goal, which is to deliver a great product or a great experience. And it's in that context that our company has become, has become popular because one of the things that we came to market with is like start focusing more on the front end, right? Start focusing more on the customer experience, on the site speed. We've demonstrated to companies that you make your website faster and you just sell more things, you make more money. So we started to try to like divorce ourselves from the code and put the focus on the experience.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. How do you— talk to me about how you see v0 fitting into that and just generally where you see v0 sitting in the whole ecosystem of— there's like Replit Agent, there's like Cloud Artifacts, there's all these different— there's Cursor Composer, there's all these different tools. Talk to me about that.

Yeah, it's exactly in the context of that idea, right? We look at v0 as code last rather than code first. When you come to v0, you prompt with your idea or your intention. You can import a Figma file so it can bring your designs alive. That's for companies that already kind of relate to that mode of working. v0 will make a lot of sense that way. But you can also just come with an idea. Build me this thing. You can— we're about to introduce templates. You can already kind of start with for example, an AI chatbot. Like, you can use AI to produce AI products. And so the biggest difference with those is that those started with the code. They look at themselves more like IDEs. And we look at this more as a product development environment that merges what you would expect from a design tool, because the things that v0 produces, we aim to make them great. It should work great. It should be accessible., it should be mobile ready. All of the things that I've been trying to teach our customers in a less scalable way by means of customer support, I would say, or professional services, you could call it, or enterprise agreements where a big company will come to us and say, look, you're the experts in building storefronts. Help me have a killer storefront for Nintendo.. And a lot of that process is just manual. Like ultimately we would have to, of course we had the framework, Next.js tries to set up the right foundation, but on top of that right foundation, there is a ton of business logic that needs to live. So the idea of v0 is could I partner you with an agent that is an expert in web development, has taste, and produces things that we're legitimately proud of, which is hard to do in the AI world because AI has become a little synonymous with, well, you can get a lot of slop from different products. So we're very focused on the outputs have to be great.

One of the things that, uh, so I had, uh, Nabil from Spark on the show, uh, last week. And one of the things that he said that I thought was really interesting is when he looks at these sort of agent products, um, there's every agent has to make a decision about how long the leash is between the user prompt and when the agent like gives a response back. Yeah. So like Copilot's a very short leash, right? Devin is like a very, very long leash. Totally. Her cursor is like sort of somewhere in the middle, maybe. Yeah. How did you think about that? And how do you think about, yeah, like when, when I put something into v0, right? Like what my experience with it is, it tries to build something like immediately and like give me the result. Yes. How do you think about that versus other ways that you can, you know, maybe check in halfway through or whatever?

Yeah, it very much depends on the task. I believe that the future of AI will be sort of the classification of an estimation of the difficulty of the task and then taking different strategies, but also getting feedback from the real world. So a concrete one is when you give us a prompt, we have to give you feedback right away because you're almost in the taste-making part of the job. It's like you hired an interior designer and they're checking for your vibes of like, okay, what do you like? Let's get deeper into this. But then you have very specific functional requirements. I've sometimes told v0, make this faster. Yeah. And it does. And sometimes actually it's taken me a few prompts. No, no, no, make it faster again. Like, it's amazing how good it is at optimizing React code. So I had a very intensive animation that it rendered and it was just expensive in how much it was recomputing. So I literally just told it, make it faster. And then I told it, make it faster again. It did what— and it was all vibes from my side. This is why I was telling you that the coder thing is It's interesting. It's like, it's strictly less important because I didn't care how, it just made it faster. And so I would expect that for that type of task, we can give Visier a longer leash. And I think there's a precise technical distinction is one feels like more in the one-shot world where you're getting knowledge plus RAG data out of the LLM. And the other one is more the feedback loop of thinking that can have an arbitrary length. And that to me is one, the thing that has allowed us to increase the quality of the product. v0 actually fixes a huge amount of error that comes out of the models. It has error correction loops because it looks at feedback behind the scenes. Another careful balance that we need to strike is how much do we expose of that process to the end user? You kind of want to learn, but you don't want to be overwhelmed by everything that the agent is trying. Yeah, yeah. So we just, we have an, I mentioned earlier, we have a product called AI SDK, which is kind of like the infrastructure underneath v0, and it's open source, and companies can use it to build their own agents and their own products. And we have a playground for it, and we just added the Deepseek R1 model, which people are raving about right now. And you can see when you use that model, that you can see every thinking token and it's actually completely overwhelming. It's so overwhelming that it's— and the classic demo that people are doing is like count the number of Rs in a strawberry and then you see it think through that process and it's overwhelming, it's nauseating, it's almost like peeking into the mind of a mad person. And so that— and now extrapolate and bring that into your product. Like, you don't want to emit every thinking token into the user, but you kind of want to give them an overview of why the leash is longer and how the agent is using your time and resources.

One of the things you made me think of in this sort of like transition from coder to something else, I don't know what word would you use?

I like to use product engineer or product developer. Another role that has emerged a lot is design engineer. I love design engineer because I care a lot about design and I, I want to make things work in the real medium. So those are the two roles that are sort of emerging.

Okay. So let's say like product engineer, design engineer, from coder to product engineer, design engineer. One of the things that I think that transition reflects is if you have machines that can build things really cheaply in a world where that was really expensive, you care a lot about how all of that works and you want to do that by hand because you want to like optimize that. Really, really well. Um, but in a world where that's really cheap, you go from caring about how, uh, like how it's done to how the end result feels.

Yes.

Um, which is why you kind of want that rapid prototyping loop. Yes. And it sort of occurs to me that that's actually also like a really long-running process. Like, um, I don't— like, I don't code in assembly, or like, I don't do garbage collection, you know.

Um, totally.

And so like, it can be—

it can even— it's so funny, garbage collection is such a good example because When people naively try to do memory allocation to make things faster, sometimes they actually underperform garbage collection. It takes a lot of skill and knowledge in a domain-specific task to get the right ROI out of manual memory management. Yeah.

And sometimes that's useful, but more often than not, it's not today. But 10 years ago, if you used Python or JavaScript, people were like, I don't know, that's not real programming. And I think today probably something similar is happening with some of these underlying like JavaScript or Python languages.

I have a lot of thoughts on this. One is AIs need to today, let's call it like this product development AIs need to sit on top of significant infrastructure for them to be useful and productive. They need to be on top of a platform. That's why it makes sense for Vizier to sit on top of Vercel and Next.js, because think of it just from an economics point of view. The AI either re-emits all of the code necessary to like render the thing, or it says, I'm gonna use Next.js and I'm gonna render the thing with it.

Right.

One would take you millions of lines of code of tokens to output if you needed to reinvent the framework. The other one might take you like 100 lines of code to produce a really good result. And so you have to think about AIs as a collaboration with infrastructure and platforms that already exist, most of which are human-made. Very much like a Waymo self-driving car needs to interoperate with the real world. We couldn't modify the streets and say, like, we're going to build new streets for self-driving. No, we needed to put the cars on top of that infrastructure. And so another thing that your comment made me think of is it is true that there's certain skills that will yield, for example, better performance or better safety, such as using Rust instead of using JavaScript. Now, my question is, is optimizing something in those languages something that AIs will be able to do in the future? Everything seems to indicate that that would be the case, because when you use these languages, you're also respecting very well-defined rules like in the case of Rust, the borrow checker lifetimes. And I think it's going to be the case that AIs can do a lot of that optimization work for us better than a human could do. It's going to take a while to get there. But I'll give you another concrete example. There's a project out of Google called Project Zero that seeks to unveil security vulnerabilities in the entire world, not just Google's products. And it's some of the most cracked security engineers on the planet.. And there's a category of bug that they always find that is in C code. There's memory corruption bugs that lead to catastrophic security vulnerabilities. Sometimes it's one line of code that you get wrong. And in our global encryption infrastructure, OpenSSL, such a line of code was found that did a very unsuspecting MCPI— one line of code that basically made the entire universe vulnerable to a really, really, really bad vulnerability. And now the problem is we know that C is not the right language for that kind of infrastructure. It's just so easy for human beings to sneak in those vulnerabilities either by mistake or tinfoil hat on, some like dark secret agent. It just takes one line to create a massive backdoor. And so the problem that we have is How do we rewrite all of that C code in Rust? And I know that this is a meme of like rewrite everything in Rust or like any other memory safe language for that matter. Will AI agents do it? My bet is yes. Will AI agents help us uncover those vulnerabilities? Because Google has maxed out on how many cracked engineers that can sort of like read all of this world code and identify those specific bugs. So it's going to be exciting to see that AI will also have a very profound impact on the underlying infra, but it'll be a different kind of task.

I think another way, I think, to say what you're saying, and you tell me if you think this is right, is for any task where you can quantify whether the task is done well along one—

Yes, a fitness function.

Um, a one, like, well-defined fitness function, um, where, uh, the steps are verifiable.

Yes.

That is going to be, like, very easy to automate. Yes., and then anything else that's much more, much higher dimensional, which I usually call like taste.

Um, yes.

And it's sort of like this aesthetic thing that's like, this actually just feels good.

Yes. And it has social effects.

Yeah.

Right.

Um, that's gonna be a little bit more, um, yeah, you just need to, you just need to figure that out.

You need to be the vibes guy above the machine. Yeah.

Um, how, how do you cultivate that in yourself?

A lot of practice, I think. I remember one of the best engineers I ever worked with, He was also a very good designer. That's how I kind of became infatuated with the idea of like, we can do more. Common wisdom in Silicon Valley was like, you're either like knee-deep in the data center room and writing backend code, or you're the designer, like super polished, like mustache. You know, like you can do both. And this guy TJ kind of taught me that. And I remember having a conversation with him and he was like, Well, look, I just train my taste a lot. I look at a lot of things. I look at what people like. I seek a lot of feedback. So I do think that you can work on your ability to discern what people are going to like. There's obviously some rules underneath, and this is what we're trying to sort of uncover with v0. It does turn out that, you know, how you distribute spacing on a page does lead for more pleasant outcomes on the viewer's eyes. And we try to sort of like yield those out of the box. But I do think taste can be worked on in sort of like the higher dimension. I like the metaphor you use of like bringing in inspiration from multiple sources and multiple things. Like thinking like radically outside the box can be super helpful. And then the art of understanding what's possible and what you can sort of like start to push the boundaries on. So It's kind of funny, but like being terminally online kind of like answers for these two things. One is you want to consume this stream of consciousness of like what good design looks like and what the avant-garde is. But you also want to be at the forefront of like what's about to become possible that I can start cooking on now. Kind of goes back to like the beginning of the conversation with Sócrates. I became aware that a real-time communication channel API was about to become possible in every single web browser on the planet, and I could start cooking on it before it was real.

Right. Like, tell me about that now. Like, what are you— what are you— what's buzzing in your ear right now that's about to become possible?

Yeah, we kind of touched on a few. It's like this idea of like domain-specific agents that are infused with taste and tools and knowledge for Even tasks that you would think, okay, maybe I could solve that with ChatGPT, but it's a ton of work and maybe the result is not that great and it can infuse a lot of quality into that vertical. This idea of agents that have the long horizon work but also can give you rapid feedback when necessary, I think there's a big opportunity there. Broadly, I continue to think of AI as this iPhone home screen on top of which we can deliver lots and lots of applications. And yeah, I think the idea of ChatGPT for X continues to surprise me. I just heard from a, I believe it was a cardiac surgeon that said, I basically spend a lot of time during my professional life using not ChatGPT, but this tool called Open Evidence, which is infused with all the health care data used by 250,000 medical professionals in the US. And it kind of makes you think, right? Like, if you're a medical professional, are you going to go to the general purpose AI that is sort of like the lowest common denominator for everything? Yeah. Or are you going to go to the thing that is constantly improving for your domain and field? Yeah. So encourage entrepreneurs to think about it that way and also find the opportunities to bring creativity into tools that are otherwise pretty plain. Of course, Copilot could autocomplete code in your IDE, but v0 took that way further, as you mentioned earlier. It's not just about the little bit of autocompletion, but bring a lot more ambition and creativity into what the AI agent can do.

Yeah, I think there's all this talk right now, or it's probably a little bit less so now, but especially like a year ago where everyone was like, well, incumbents are just going to win. If you have access to AGI, distribution is all that matters and blah, blah, blah. And I don't think that that has panned out, and I don't think that will— it has not— that will continue to pan out because, like, part of what you're saying is, like, for example, the doctor, um, issue is, like, it's not just that maybe O1 or ChatGPT is, like, not tailored for doctors. It's that it has to be a general-purpose tool. So it has to say, like, I'm not a medical professional, right? And, like, you prob— and I— and it has to have guards against, like, what it says.

There's almost, like, a principle there. Like, every refusal of ChatGPT can be turned into a tool that doesn't have to refuse because it's actually going the extra mile, whether it's with better data, with, you know, maybe even human in the loop, whatever it is. Every refusal is my opportunity.

Exactly. Yeah, I love that. And I think another way to say that is startups get to take risk and the intelligence that is available is not necessarily a technical limitation anymore. It's often like a risk calculus by a particular kind of company serving a particular kind of user. And big companies have to serve everyone, and so they have to take lower risks.

And in terms of disruption, there is a very concrete one that I think a lot about. The history of SaaS has been I start out creating a product that's really good in its category, and then I expand its feature set to beat out my competitors in enterprise bakeoffs. And so you become a competition of checklists And there is a precise correlation between product maturity, enterprise maturity, and amount of UI. Like, you can actually quantify the number of buttons, the number of dropdowns, the number of nested dropdowns. And so all of that UI can vanish without a trade-off in functionality if you're thinking from first AI principles. And that gives the startup a very concrete wedge to attack the incumbent. I'm going to underdo you. I'm going to underwork you. I'm going to under-UI you. Right? It's like, and I actually will beat you on functionality. Because if you're solving problems with classical engineering alone and if-else branches— this is— I love the Karpathy Software 1.0 to Software 2.0. Software 1.0 is if-else, invert binary tree, and algorithms and data structures. And AI is like, well, maybe that computation ends up happening, but we don't know why.

And so we have that agility, that space of possible programs to solve the problem instead of having a recipe.

And that's a concrete way of underdoing the competition because you're just having the AI produce better or equal outcomes with a lot less manual code. Yeah.

And I think that that's such a— it's also an important, like, thing that I think startups sometimes get wrong in this era, which is like trying to do, let's say, like an email product or like, I don't know, any, any, any classic productivity software, maybe like PowerPoint or something like that, where what you're trying— what you end up— some products end up doing is doing the classic version plus AI, um, like plus a chatbot or whatever, um, which is exactly what incumbents do too, where I think like what's— what you actually want to do is figure out, okay, what's the totally new form factor and how do I be worse on all of the checkbox dimensions, um, but so good on the thing that matters?

That 100% that there's actually— I would say there's two models that I think a lot about. One is actually you can be better at eventually every checkbox, but in the meantime, you're overwhelmingly better and simpler. Exactly. I think eventually you do need to do more because companies just want to simp— like another thing I've learned with Vercel, and when you go to enterprises and larger companies, they want to buy only a handful of software platforms. This is why Microsoft and Amazon and others are so prolific is like they provide like broad solution spaces.

Yeah.

Eventually you need to get there, but I like your idea of in the meantime, you're just like a killer at a specific dimension. You're way simpler and perhaps you'll never have to have the UI complexity of those incumbents.

How does that sit with you? Because you're just stylistically like a minimalist simplicity guy. Yeah. Um, and Vercel like kind of has to be a little, if you want to be enterprisey, you have to have all the checkboxes or something like that. Like, how are you thinking about that?

Yeah, you can think of v0 as almost like the AI-native interface into the Vercel world. And I expect the next billion developers to sort of come in through that door. And then there is the eject button into Vercel, very much like Vercel kind of did that to AWS. And people still need AWS, and we have great integrations and many more coming where we create a bridge to the lower level. I like your concept of you're basically raising the abstraction bar very much like we did with manual memory management and garbage collection. We're saying, look, at the very, very bottom, there is the rock-solid foundation. There's a bedrock, literally, of hyperscaler clouds like AWS. And then you have the developer infrastructure on top. I believe most of the world will want to interact with developer infrastructure because you don't want to go to the raw materials and do alchemy there. Most— and this, the success of Vercel speaks to that. But now there's another level, and it's almost like a self-disruption that we're doing with v0, which is like, look, most people are going to want to interact through these agents. They're going to make it more accessible, more design-oriented, less infrastructure-oriented. And what's nice for us is that you still have the two sort of like levers to pull. Some more mature organizations say like, look, were not ready for AI. I've talked to folks in super regulated markets where we're running a lot of their web projects and they were like, please don't say the AI word in my office, literally during an onsite. And then there is the people that are like, don't say the code. Actually, fascinating. One of our enterprise customers for v0 is a company that without giving away too many details, has been in the cloud space since the cloud was born, like literally like in the room where the cloud was invented. And they told me our new organization is just a V0 organization. We have it as a rule that we don't do code. Most— they showed me their Slack conversations. It's just them sending V0s back and forth. There's no GitHub, there's no infra, there is no anything. There's just building products, going back and forth and having shared channels with their clients where they also send them V0s. And so they're trying to even innovate in how the company altogether works. And so there's people that are going to live in that level of abstraction, just like there's so many companies that only use Vercel. There's companies that combine both. A lot of enterprises use Vercel. It can connect into AWS through a product called Secure Compute, and they kind of live in two worlds. Most startups live only in the Vercel world. And so it's going to be interesting to see, like, and perhaps is there another level of abstraction coming? Where the result comes to you in a much more sort of objective way and you're giving less feedback, yet to be seen.

That's interesting. Yeah, one of the things that sparks for me is I watched a talk by Eugene Wei that he did at— we ran a conference called Thesis and he spoke at it. It was an amazing talk and he was talking about about the different kinds of company cultures and how that affects the kinds of products you can build. And he made a distinction between a written culture and a prototype or demo culture. And in a written culture, which he would say Amazon is a written culture, I think Stripe is written culture. How interesting. You're building products that can be expressed cleanly in writing, right? Yeah. And what that lends itself to is if you look at AWS, for example, it has all the specs. Like all of the logic and rigor is there, but like the Amazon phone like just feels like shit because it has the specs, but like it doesn't feel good, right?

I think people don't even appreciate the extent that they're so good at writing correct, highly available, secure infrastructure and what goes into making that sausage.

Exactly. And that's an output of like being able to have everything written down versus he makes the example of Apple where like the early iPhone, like Apple is a prototype culture. Like every time you do something, you go and give a demo to Steve and Steve like rips you and then you like make it better, right? Yeah. And I think v0 and this company you just mentioned, like it allows us to like move—

To live in that Apple world, 100%. It's so interesting. I think to each their own, right? Like for each role that you play in the ecosystem, you need to like lean more towards one or the other. So for example, AWS, not only do they have a written culture, they have an automatic reasoning team that writes TLA+ proofs of correctness of all their cryptography and durability. I can trust them with my clinical records. I can trust them with anything. And I know that those people have written mathematical proofs of the certainty of that code and the distributed system that supports it. And then on the other hand, you need tasks that are so creative that imagine writing a mathematical proof before you sit down to cook on a product. And so what I like about Vercel is that I think we've blended both. We have so much respect for that work that sometimes a lot of people ask me like, do you want to build your own data center? I said like, do you even realize what goes into getting to that level of quality? My job is to procure the best possible components, just like the iPhone bundles a lot of incredible hardware that you don't know about., but you know that it's the best at doing that task. And then I want to enable you to live in that world of like vibes almost, right? Like prototyping, creativity, velocity, performance, etc.

Yeah, that's great. I think that's a, that's a good place to leave it. This is an incredible conversation. Thanks so much for doing it.

That was fun.

Would love to have you back. Will do. Cool.

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