Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create 100 million builders | Guillermo Rauch

One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, V0 is like a super genius five-year-old PhD with ADHD. I'm not going to oversell this. It knows everything about everything, but it has this sparks of brilliance.

How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams?

People could be more full stack. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves on what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about. about making possible on these web services.

A lot of people are wondering, what happens to engineers should I learn how to code?

A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.

We hear this word taste all the time in terms of building taste. People are always like, how the hell.

Do I do that? Taste Sometimes I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that it can develop. I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. And you'll develop that muscle.

Where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen?

Stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software.

Today, my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, which amongst other things makes a product called V0, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world like Next.js and Socket.IO. He's both a builder and is building a product that's going to change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you want to really understand how product development is going to change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear notion, superhuman, perplexity, Pro and Granola. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com With that, I bring you Guillermo Rauch. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google, to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com this episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get one $10,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's v-a-n-t-a.com/lenny. Guillermo, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time, I guess, participating in the podcast and love being here.

I appreciate that. Okay. So I know you saw this. I did the survey recently where I asked my readers, what tools do you use most in your day-to-day work as a product? builders or product manager. And in the category of engineering tools, V0 came in right below Cursor and GitHub for people's most used AI building tools. So clearly people love what you're doing.

Yeah, we're very happy to see that. And for us, we're at the very beginning of the journey in some ways because V0 is a relatively new tool. But Vercel, our company has been around for a while. The way that I explain to people is, Anytime you're using the internet, if there's a website or web application that's really fast, innovative, hopefully it's running on our platform. We're out there, we're running a lot of websites at scale. If you watch the Super Bowl recently, three different companies were promoting digital products that were built and delivered on Vercel. So not only can you deploy your ideas and build them on Vercel, they can scale to huge volumes of traffic and huge audiences. So A lot of people know us because of a framework called Next.js. It's an open source framework based on the React technology, open source by Meta, and it powers some of the most innovative products on the internet. So when you use Claude or Grok or Mid Journey, you're using Next.js, you're using Vercel's technologies. So with V0, what we're trying to do is, and it's funny because you put us in the rightfully, I think, in the building or development category in that survey. But what we're trying to do with v0 is help more people participate in building software, increase the sort of the total addressable market of people that are actually shipping things, shipping real products. And at the same time, just like you would with ChatGPT, we want v0 to be just extremely, extremely easy. And the outputs that it generates make them as refined and realistic as possible. the things that you created with v0, hopefully live up to that standard set by, you know, some of the best and largest websites on the internet.

I was going to ask you how v0 came out of Vercel. And my theory was, it was like, you guys are sitting around being like, how do we get more people building websites? And it's like, okay, let's just help them do it really easily.

Is that, it's like TAM expansion for Vercel. Is that, yeah, in some ways it's, it's what I've been doing for not only 10 years that I've been almost working on Vercel, but maybe my entire life because my strength as a developer is kind of meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So Next.js is one, but before that, in a previous life, I created another tool called Socket.IO, which is a real-time communication mechanism that powers, for example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion needs to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators, they use a real time engine that I built for Socket.IO. So the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because I took something that was very difficult to do, but very compelling. It was with real time in the past. It's building cutting edge applications on the web with Next.js. And I try to make it as easy as possible. But you still needed to know development skills, right? For us, and the opportunity was if there is maybe 5 million React developers, which is the sort of the library engine that we use, and there is maybe 20 million JavaScript developers. How many product builders or people with aspirations of building products exist? My back of the napkin, like minimum calculation is a hundred million. And I'll tell you, it's funny where I get that number from. Slack has about a hundred million monthly active users. And what you do on Slack is you go in it and you talk to people. And a lot of those people are building digital products, right? And they talk to one another about what they would want to see in the world. They talk to customers through shared channels. I love that feature. We talk to a lot of the Vercel customers and like they tell us, like, I want to build this, I want to see that, I want this feature, I want that thing. And so the opportunity with v0 was, it's not that you're going to stop talking to other people, but what if you could yap into the computer and see something happen? Build a prototype, build your first version of a product, build a demo, build a full stack product, build it and ship it. And so the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of Vercel. But concretely, the Genesis story was when ChatGPT came out, we noticed that it was very good at writing the code that our tools used. So ChatGPT, right out of the bat, was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind, which is a CSS styling technology, was good at Next.js, and again, the power of open source. Our tools are already in the training data of the internet. And so that long-term bet and vision and open source really paid off. And so because the models were so good at writing this kind of code, the idea for v0 came naturally from what if we could build a chat GPT for building web products? Speaking of that, I didn't actually know.

So I had Bolt see on the podcast and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked what they are doing. And you guys, do you guys sit on chat GPT and open AI stuff?

We started out on open AI and we've always used a combination of models. It's funny right now on Twitter, there's a million, there's three with a million views of people trying to reverse engineer the prompt and the models on Reddit. And they're all finding that there is all this kind of different models that are specialists in different tasks. And there's a pipeline of models where a model could hand off work to another model. And so OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, but we predate Anthropic because I'll give credit to ChatGPT that the utility of it was so general purpose. But from the very first release, it was very good. In fact, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, the first prototype of V0 might have even predated ChatGPT or At the very least, I think we were running on GPT 3.5. So we've always had this vision of unlocking more power for the web through LLMs. And there's a lot of very interesting technical details of why, by the way, LLMs happen to be so good at the task of web design and web development that we could get into. But it was like the perfect timing for us.

I want to come back to that. That's actually a really good question. But let me ask a couple other questions here. In terms of v0, what's the scale at this point? We hear all these numbers about all the folks in the space. What can you share about what's happening with v0?

I can share that it's growing exponentially and that over 1.3 million users have interacted with v0 so far. We had our largest day ever yesterday and today again, we're one of the largest customers of most of cloud providers at this point. We're hitting the limits of every GPU, LLM infrastructure out there in the planet.

And.

The most exciting thing for me is what I'm seeing people build with v0. So we launched a feature about a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called v0 community. It already has 20,000 submissions. I'm sure people in your audience have used Figma. One of the things that I love at Figma is Figma files. that I can go and grab a starting point for something. It could be a logo, could be a menu, and you can start with something that someone has already contributed, kind of like that spirit of open source. And so in less than a month, I think we've done over 20,000 community submissions. So we've learned so much about building AI products with this, and we continue to sort of open source and share our best practices. But one of the things that I've definitely learned is Prompting it seems like the easiest interface in the world because it's just an input, right? And you put text in it. But there's a little bit of a writer's block sometimes. So one of my favorite things that I've seen, and I even look at the homepage right now, and you can see like a random assortment of community submissions, and they have 1200 forks and 1500 forks and 6000 forks. And this is every time people saying like, oh, instead of starting from scratch, I'll start from this application that someone else has built. I'm going to prompt it to modify.

It and make it my own. So the community submissions are people building apps on v0 and sharing what they build. Correct.

You can look at the code and fork it. And it's becoming like a compounding investment, right? Like people share something, someone else grabs it, makes it better. Maybe you use it at that point. In many ways, I see this as the next evolution of GitHub. whereas GitHub was so, it was a marvel for software development because it, I don't know if you remember this, but like the initial little tagline underneath the GitHub logo was social coding. And it had this democratization effect of building software, but you still needed to know how to code. And so what we're after is social product building in many ways, right? Like everybody should be able to cook and share what they're building.

I love how I hadn't thought of it this way, but I love that it connects so much to your open source roots where people are building on V0 and then sharing what they're building and then people can build off those things. It's kind of like an open source AI building experience.

It's fascinating, right? Like in many ways, if you think about the Git commit, the Git commit is super interesting. If you watch how an engineer works, they look at a problem, They spend a lot of time in their code editor and at the end they say, I think I got it. I think I've fixed it. And then they produce a git commit. They summarize their intent and what they try to do after they've done the work. V0 inverts that. The git commit is you go into the chat and say, Please change the color of this button and when I click it, save this form to a database. And so you're starting with the intent and the output is the code. And as a side effect, we can also produce a Git commit for you. That feature is not online yet, but it's coming in the next couple days. Spoiler alert for the group. And so I like this idea of we can create this superset. of all software building with this platform. And that is true to my initial intention with Vercel. Our mission is to enable the world to build and ship the best products. And so enabling that for the largest possible group of people is very exciting to me.

So let's go to this question of just kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of people, seeing these things happening, product builders that have, you know, that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. with apps like this coming around, where you could just type a thing in and build it for you, and it's beautiful. How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams? Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen? How do you think product will be built in the next few years?

The most profound one that I kind of alluded to is that conversations between product builders and their customers will be mediated by these zero links, these artifacts. I think when Claude came up with the name artifacts, I found it phenomenal because we're all in this world, especially in this group of people, we're here to build awesome things and share them with the world. Steve Jobs had this awesome speech about it's like our form of giving back to the world is to try and do the best possible job we can and share it with the world. And so the idea that when we talk, we would not have the power to make those ideas a reality seems it seems like an L to me. I would love to see people constantly live in the product. be in the design, spend time tuning and trying out new ideas. And that's what the ideal work of the future should look like. And less about kind of, again, that abstraction that being removed from the product or even the sometimes I can feel powerless to not be able to change something. This happens a lot when Departments collaborate within an organization. Marketing wants designed to do something. Marketing wants engineering is a design. It cuts all ways, right? Like one of the things that people had got excited about that we published on the Vercel blog was about design engineering. Because a lot of the people that we were noticing were being very successful at Vercel were people that had both the design and engineering skills. And that was actually another huge motivator and inspiration for v0 because we realized that people could be more full stack. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about making possible on these web services. And so you could imagine removing all those limitations. A designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production, an engineer, a lot of people that use V0 are backend engineers that never had the ability to, you know, sort of like they could ship an API, they could build a great low level infrastructure system, but to actually bring their end to end vision to life, V0 is sort of completing that for them.

So let me follow the thread on engineers. A lot of people are wondering, do we need engineers in the future? What happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code? You're a long time engineer. Thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career for themselves?

Yeah, I think knowing how things work is the most important skill in the world. I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful in building and shipping amazing products and building gigantic companies and everything you could imagine, where a single person can do the job of a hundred different people in a hundred different specializations. Take the example of one skill set that's really important to build a front-end product is you need to know how to use CSS or Tailwind to style it. And once upon a time, I would hire people that were truly specialists in this task. The task of there's a Figma design or there is some kind of sketch and translating that into reality because they knew really well how to manipulate layouts, layout code, box model code, we call it, and borders, paddings, margins, flexbox, all these technologies for styling. And notice I actually use the word translation very intentionally because the origin of the LLM goes as, or the transformer architecture at least, goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were generative LLM techniques, basically. That's how they cross that chasm of like, remember when translating tools were horrible and then one day the problem was just solved, right? And I look at a lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations that I think are going away in a way. or the tasks to be done, they're translation tasks. We were translating from a screenshot or intent or a design into a React and Tailwind and CSS implementation. And right now, v0 is incredibly good at doing that. It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out, I run this test of like converting my own website and try to generate it with the zero. Last time I did it, it had taken me like 10 prompts to replicate it. Keep in mind, I'm an expert front-end engineer that's been in the arena since I'm like 10 years old and I'm 35 now. And so I do that test because it's almost like a test of self-imposed humility. I remember exactly how long it took me to build my website, with Next.js, the framework that I created, and ship it. And so with the last model, it took me maybe 10, 15 prompts. With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from the design intent into working implementation, another anecdote that I like to share with people is the model, because v0 tries to embed all of the best practices of the web, the model output more accessible code than when I wrote. It follows the accessibility guidelines that the web standards consortiums put out better than I did. It means it just knows everything. And so that those tasks where you can almost model it to a translation task, definitely going away, but knowing how things work under the hood, notice all the I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying CSS, I'm saying layout. I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better. And so the TLDR would be knowing how things work, the symbolic systems, and that will mean that you have to probably go into each subject with less depth. I have engineers at Vercel that know every single CSS property by heart. They know when they became available in a certain web browser. They've been tracking this specification. It's almost like you're in a Copley of knowledge of each CSS property. You probably won't need that in the future. And probably that's Good, because you'll free up your mind for more ambitious things.

That is fascinating. So what I'm hearing is a skill that will continue to be valuable in the future, no matter, but I want to push on this a little bit. No matter how far AI gets, is understanding the conceptually how software works, backend systems, databases, CSS is a thing. So say, I don't know if you have kids, whether you have kids or not, just say they were like trying to decide what should I learn to be, you know, to thrive in this future? Well, how would you summarize it? Like how far should they get into software engineering?

Great question because I have five kids and I've already enrolled them in this school of G myself in the sense that I'm already guiding them towards the things I think are going to be very useful to them. So understanding how things work needs I think the ability to understand the fundamental logic behind things incredibly valuable. So I push them really hard on math. If you don't know math really well, you're out of my house. Just kidding. But like, it's a fundamental skill that I want them to know. Eloquence. So I joke sometimes, have you heard a meme of word sells? versus shape rotators. Yeah. So a shape rotator is someone that only has a math brain, right? You could argue the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shape rotators because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status respect, net worth, whatever. And then there's the word cells, which is communicating more of the liberal arts. There's also the Funny and awesome slide of Apple saying that they are at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. I've always had immense amounts of respect for both sides of the brain, so to speak. But I think developing great eloquence in knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about, knowing how to refer to things in that global mental map of symbolic systems will be highly valuable. And we have some tools to help people prompt better, but prompt enhancement and embellishment cannot replace thinking and cannot replace your own creativity that you want to infuse into the world. So one of the things that V0 does is it tries, and it succeeds, I think, at creating very nice designs out of the box. We try to infuse what we've learned about What do people think is typically good web design? We've influenced the model in that direction. But still, we also don't want the whole internet to look the same way. So your ability to steer the model with your words into those references, into those inspirations is going to be very important. I actually have an amazing anecdote. We hosted a design demo night at the Vercel HQ in San Francisco last night. and we were showing off how Vercel uses Vercel to build Vercel and to build Vercel. And one of our designers showed this amazing animation that he built, actually two amazing animations that he built. And in one of them, it was this amazing triangle that had an animation that I didn't think was possible to make, in that it was all built with Vercel. And he used the word turbulence to describe the effect that he wanted. So I just want to call out that to people because the difference between knowing that word and not knowing it is getting that style into that beautiful triangle that he created that was interactive. And it's probably going to end up in some landing page soon that you're going to visit on Vercel.com. And so developing eloquence and your linguistic ability, I think is gonna be very important. So I love my kids to know that.

And.

I think that idea of sharing things and putting yourself out there and, and, and broadcasting to the world. So another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons, which is went to an awesome hackathon at, University of San Francisco, USF. It was called the Bloom Hackathon and it took two of my kids. And I wanted them to watch how people presented their ideas. And we had a lot of fun. We also ate waffles and grilled sandwiches, which is a bonus. So presenting and putting yourself out there. I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast when we were chatting, I've learned so much from you and your guests because you put out all this awesome little posts on X. and these videos and this is snippets of your interviews. And so the ability to present what you've built and put yourself out there, incredibly important skill in the future, especially in a world where the marginal cost of producing software and new things are going down. You need to build an audience. You need to know how to talk to people. You need to build your own signature brand and style. So maybe they're a little too young for that one, but I guess taking them into hackathons probably like, you know, back is influencing their neural networks or pre-training data for the future. I love it.

They're going to tell their friends out. My dad took me to a hackathon. What's that? So are you actually, are you encouraging them to learn to code? Cause it's interesting you mentioned math, eloquence, presenting, and then, okay, so also learn to code. Yeah, I think again.

Learning how to prompt, learning how to code. With v0, we show you the code when we build things. So that if you can build that mapping of like, maybe not learning how to code in the necessarily in like the as an abstraction, if you do have a knack for it, kind of like, you know, I'm a big believer also that my five kids have like super diverse personalities and inclinations. And I don't want to be, you know, pushing for something that they wouldn't want to do or whatever. And so learning to code in the abstract might be good for some people, might be good, might may not be the fun thing to do for other people. And so what I would recommend is try to understand how things work. So if, if you prompt v0 or any other tool and it generates some code, Try to build an understanding of what that does at a high level. It's like actually maybe an extension even of eloquence. One of the bets that I made early on with Vercel that really paid off is Vercel, maybe as a metaphor, is like AWS in easy mode for a lot of people. We have a very large user base of people that would have otherwise not have been able to configure all of the ins and outs of the cloud. but do want the scale, flexibility, speed, et cetera. They want to create very high quality products and services. So I like to give the Super Bowl example because one of our customers, Ramp, had a 43x increase in traffic when their ad went live. The engineer that worked on that only needed to learn Next.js. Then they pushed their code to Vercel, and now they can reach an audience of 100 million people. without a blip, 100% uptime. That superpower comes from we made it as easy as possible to get started. And the language that we choose is actually very relevant in the story. JavaScript is almost, in my mind, has always been almost like the English of programming languages. It's a language that if you learn it, you reach billions of devices. So it's not a coincidence that when you ask ChatGPT or Anthropic or Gemini to build you a web app, it uses these tools. It uses JavaScript. It uses React. It's become the lingua franca of building products on the web. So I would say to my kids, look, if you do want to go deeper into programming, start learning there. You can reach huge numbers of people. If you have a passion, I would say there's going to be a fundamental engineering skill that's going to be useful for decades or centuries to come, which is creating foundational infrastructure. Think about LLMs in terms of they're like oracles that can go and write software for you, but there's a limit to how much software they can write. There's context Windows. There is time and computational constraints. So it's very hard for an agent today to go and say, I'm going to write a cloud from scratch. I'm going to write all the foundational services. I'm going to write the framework from scratch. I'm going to write the compiler. No, the LM is orchestrating those tools and infrastructure. It's not writing the compiler from scratch. Otherwise, you get into the Newton thing. In order to create an apple, you have to create the entire underlying universe. No, the elements are interoperating with the universe as it exists. And so the engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably going to be extremely empowered still for years to come.

Like there's a world where you could argue ChatGPT will build the next version of ChatGPT. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long ways away. if ever.

Absolutely. This is why, you know, the common, the running joke is that all of these companies have, you go to their career page and it's like, engineer, engineer, engineer, right? The counterpoint of that is that at Vercel, we have 150 engineers that can write code and 600 total headcount. Now we have 600 engineers. One of the best things that some of the best things that I've seen created with v0 have not come from our AI team. They've come from the marketing team. They've come from the sales team. They've come from the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, right? Because now they're actually building the product. So last night I saw how we've specced out in v0. Think of it as like a live PRD. We've specced out how the new functionality for deploying a v0 to Vercel is going to work. The amount of detail that was contained in that the zero, I mean, we're all just saying, well, just ship it. There's nothing else to discuss, right? Like it was animated, it was interactive. We were demonstrated the error state, the success state, the slow stream state. So it really empowers product builders not only with technical skills, I think that does a disservice to the tool. It empowers them to explore and augment their thinking with a lot of things that perhaps they wouldn't have considered otherwise. A lot of states of the product they wouldn't have considered otherwise.

The name v0 implies the product is for prototypes for kind of like the first attempt at stuff. And that's definitely where all these tools are finding product market fit. Prototypes, PMs showing A thing working versus just design. Do you expect v0 and other tools to get to a place where you can build salesforce.com and scale it to billions of dollars? You do. Okay.

We already have a customer, an enterprise customer of v0, that only works with v0. All of their products, all of their features, all of their client communications are v0 native. Two days ago, I just heard Anecdotally on X, someone tells me, my brother just sold his first website to a client completely built in V0. Yesterday at an investor conference, an investor walks up to me and says, two of my friends just got engaged on V0. I was like, okay, okay, V0 is a dating app now. So the engagement website, the proposal, the wedding, it's all V0 native. So because we've integrated V0, the Vercel infrastructure, We can do that whole story that I just told you of like, I have a website to build and I can get it in front of a hundred million people. We can enable that for everybody now. And so the end to end full stack, v0 native and built on this awesome fluid serverless infrastructure that scales to billions of people, all just from prompts or screenshots or just copying and pasting your PRDs into the tool.

So let's help people be successful with V0 and then let's also do a demo. But before we get there, let me ask you this. So imagine you could magically sit next to someone who's about to use V0 for the first time and whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with V0. What would a couple tips be?

So number one is you can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what do you ask the tool? If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have, you're always going to get better results. If you don't have ideas on what to build or what to prompt, I would recommend using the V0 community so that you can find something to fork to get started. I would say in some ways, if you have technical skills, this one is interesting. have some suspension of disbelief. Like what I, like it humbled me, right? I was saying about like accessibility. So be open minded about whether the tool actually knows some things that you might not know. And so focus more on the product description, right? Like focus more on like, what do you want the end user to experience? What do you want the product to do in try to be open minded about how well the tool can implement it. Those would be my main ones. You also have to have a sense.

Of.

Iteration, I guess. Think of it this way. If you were working with a design firm or an agency that you've hired, you will go back and forth and say, try something else. If you were coaching an engineer, that's getting stuck in something, you would say, try something else. It's amazing how many times I've gotten unstuck in V0 by just saying, like, just try something else.

Just saying that as the prompt, not even saying that.

Like, I mean, the chat is like, V0, we need to have, it's like, you know, like you have a one-on-one performance review with a tool. Hey, way to talk, try something else. What you're doing so far is not working. It's amazing. Like one fitness function that I'm keeping in my head is I really want to find the thing that it cannot build with Visier. So I, as part of the Visier community, I have my own profile. We'll share the link with people. You can see six or seven things that I've built that I consider to be pretty impressive. So for example, I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight while I'm on the flight. So I open flight radar or whatever, and I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that flight radar. I don't know which one it was. The flight radar is like a four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had ads. They were not what I wanted the flight radar to look like. So I built my own during the flight with the worst internet connection that you could imagine in the world, integrated into a flight data API called Edge Aviation. So this is what I told V0, we're going to build the best flight radar on the planet. I wasn't prescriptive about how, So it used a tool called Mapbox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell them that or her and if you know what it is. And subsequently, once we cooked on the design, which looks, I would say beautiful, I then got more ambitious and I said, all right, let's make it real now. And by the way, that's actually how I would work. So it's how I like to work. I like to work experience first, and that's also how Vercel was built. Let's start with the front end. Let's start with the planes on the screen. And by the way, there's a lot of subtleties here. For example, there's so many flights going on at any given time that there's just too many. So I had to work with V0 on improving performance. And once again, I wasn't prescriptive. I just said, we have a lot of flights. Chief.

Let's- Did she say Chief?

I actually do say that a lot. And this is, I think, when I shared it on X, it blew a lot of engineers' minds because it created a Canvas-based. Canvas is the sort of underlying rendering surface that very sophisticated products use like Figma. And it created this awesome overlay on top of the map that can render tens of thousands of flights at any given time. And then I told it, let's make it a full stack application. I, okay, plug it into the flights API. So that's an example of like, we cooked and there was no limit. And so I'm always in the lookout, the service that I'm providing to the V0 community is I'm part of the team that is really trying to break this and say, like, can it not build something? And even when it does build it, we're very obsessed with quality and performance. Like it has to be real. That's our commitment to our users.

And how much does this cost? How much time does this take to make something like this?

So the flight radar example or Visu.

Yeah, the flight radar example specifically.

I mean, that one probably took less than two hours with the worst internet. Sorry, Janet Airlines, I love you, but give me a hard time.

And what did that cost? Like 10 bucks? what would you estimate?

I mean, I pay for the $20 VJ20 bucks.

So, okay, for a month. So it's like a month, but you use it for two hours, 20 bucks. Yeah. If you had engineers building this, how much do you think that would cost? How long do you think that would take?

I mean, weeks easily, easily.

And that's like tens of thousands of dollars.

Maybe the most cracked engineer out of our cell could knock it out in a, like, without using any AI. could knock it out in a couple days. But then what about the design? What about like me? Because I'm the bottleneck, not the engineer. And this is what's amazing about this collaboration, right? Because like I'm providing the product guidance. I'm saying draw a dashed line between the, by the way, this is a video that just blew my mind so hard. I said draw a dashed line between the two destination airports. And these zeros said, well, I have to account for the spherical, or what is it? Is it a pseudosphere for the curvature of the earth? It's like, okay, these zeros, super genius, whatever. And so that's what I mentioned about how you can go back and forth. It's like a product copilot is like an all-knowing being. One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. to the tool. And it was positive feedback. They were very happy what they were saying, like, v0 is, like, a super genius five-year-old PhD with ADHD. So, like, you still have to, like, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna oversell this. It's like, you know, it knows everything about everything. It's like, is everything perfect? Of course.

But.

But it has this Sparks of Brilliance, really, truly, I think. I've been a big believer that AGI undersells what we're collectively building because we already have all of this sparks of super intelligence. I don't believe that V0 is an AGI. If it knows everything about how to draw a dashed line according to the curvature of the earth and this high performance map of airplanes, that's just superhuman. And it's, yeah, it's a joy to use.

Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. One of the hardest and also most important parts of B2B marketing is reaching the right people. I am constantly getting ads for products that I will never buy. And I almost feel sorry for the money that these companies are spending pitching me on their spend management software or some kind of cybersecurity solution that my one man business just does not need. When you're ready to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision-makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad platforms. You can target your ad buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even company revenue. All the professionals that you need to reach in one place. Stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so that you can try it for yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash pod Lenny. That's LinkedIn.com slash pod Lenny. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. As you talk, it's interesting the way I'm thinking about this now. There's almost like three core skills in building apps with AI. There's figuring out what to build, there's making it look good, like design, and then there's getting it unstuck.

Yeah.

And it's interesting how like these are going to be coaching. Coaching it.

Yeah.

Or just like, here's a, oh, here's the, here's like the database error. I don't know. It's not figuring it out. Yeah. On the, I guess, does that resonate?

I've never thought of it. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I'll tell you a little bit of a story of something that I So even going way back in time, Next.js builds on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created. Actually with very similar goals. They had so many cracked engineers and they had to help them collaborate on an enormous product surface. So they invented, or at least pioneered, I would say, the concept of this component as a unit of reusability, as a building block, as a Lego brick of how you build software. It's no coincidence that LLMs love to work with React components, by the way. And one of the things that always stood out to me about that model is it basically enables people to scale in how they worked together. And one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing is they called it a scape hatch. The API, when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system, they give you a scape hatch. They say, okay, engineer, you're on your own now. There's no guardrails. And in fact, one of these escape hatches is called dangerously set inner HTML. They want the developer to know uncharted territory. But they did give people the API. That is a profound systems design engineering principle. And throughout my life, I've always thought about escape hatches. One amazing escape hatch that v0 has is that you're looking at the code that we're generating with Next.js. You can edit it. You can even have other experts look at it. One thing that one of our demos last night came from this awesome company Luma Labs. They're creating one of the most amazing video models in the world. And they use V0 and Vercel extensively to build their application, their websites, et cetera. And the design engineer was talking about how he was on a V0 that had 120 or so iterations. So he was knee deep into the latent space. He was in the matrix. And at one point he got stuck, but you know what he did? He copied and pasted the code that we generated and he gave it to ChatGPT-01. And ChatGPT-01 thought about the solution. I honestly, I'd never even thought about this myself. I was so blown away. And it doesn't speak to, I love your third point of, you need to learn a skill how to get unstuck. It's like a profound life lesson. It's just more generic life advice. You need to get... Facebook actually had a principle, don't get blocked. Seek to get unblocked, seek help from other people. What's fascinating is that you can seek help from other AIs to get unstuck. And those escape hatches of actually understanding and seeing the code underneath And even being able to say, okay, now let's use Git, let's turn this into a less, more of a hybrid project, not just prompts, but also traditional software engineering. The fact that that door is open to you is extremely valuable.

Let's actually make this super concrete and show people what this actually looks like in v0. So pull up, we'll share screen, and then we'll do a little live demo. We'll keep it brief. I find people are like, okay, I get it. But we'll make it fun and brief at the same time. There it is. I see it.

Beautiful.

How can I help you ship?

Yeah, of course. We're all about shipping. Okay, so as I mentioned, you write in English, you yap into the tool. I'll say for a demo, let's create a contact sales form in the style of By the way, I had a typo. I don't care. Yeah, let's get it. Instead of Supreme, the clothing company for an online store. Now, I mentioned that sometimes people get blocked on, like, there is like a writer paralysis at this step. So we added enhanced prompt. So now, like, you're tapping into the latent space of the model, which has a random component to it. And by the way, this is still not a substitute. It doesn't contradict what I said earlier of knowing the meaningful tokens, knowing.

What.

The right style is and what it's called and whatever is still highly valuable. So the first thing you're going to notice is that as the model thinks, you can introspect its thinking. So we added this recently and it's been Most inspired actually by the Deep Sea Revolution, I would say. So the fact that when you tell it develop a contact sales form, like what is it going to do? Like we talked about escape hatches. Okay, it's going to use ShatCNUI, it's going to use Tailwind CSS, it's going to use React. And this is your opportunity that if v0 is not doing exactly what you wanted, this is your opportunity to actually go and sort of correct or influence or give feedback and so on. So you're going to notice it spits out a bunch of files and it gives me the thing that I wanted, right? So I'm going to zoom out a little bit here. So a couple of things that stand out here that, I mean, as a, again, as an experienced engineer, I can point out, the underlying component system that it uses is the same component system that the best tools on the planet are built with. This is called ShadCN. If you go to grok.com today, they're using Chat CN to build their UI, they're using Next.js, you're getting that caliber of code. The other thing that it did is people on social media talk about this a lot. When you use a global shared component system with the world, you don't want everything to look the same. So the fact that it was able to apply the style and it kind of knew what Supreme looked like was kind of cool. But now I'm going to say actually because I'm building a financial institution, make it more serious, make it in the style of, let's say, Charles Schwab, change typefaces. So this is the iteration process of like, I'm gonna go and give feedback to the model, I'm gonna make it try different things. So once that initial generation was already created, Now the model is actually acting more as an editor. It's going and making tweaks to what's already been built. And this actually scales to very large projects. You could have started with something much bigger. So in the meantime, I'm going to show you what Luma Labs created with v0, which is absolutely phenomenal. I loved this last night. It already has 2000 forks. I was telling you about the power of our community. So by the way, you can just click Community here on the V0 sidebar. I'm going to fork it because they generously shared it with the world. Notice all the incredible animations here. By the way, they shipped this to hire and attract talent to their company. I recommend them, by the way, like you should, if you want to be a brand designer, take them into consideration. Notice that it's an interactive. Everything is AI generated. They use their own AI image generation tool. to create these beautiful frames. These are all AI generated as well. And it's interactive. So there is the auto-playing functionality. This is actually a complex layout in animation system that they built entirely in Vizzero. I was telling you that at one point they even got some advice from Olan, so shout out to OpenAI. I'm going to say, make it Sepia. style colors. So this is an example of like, okay, I fork something, I already have a starting point, my bank grade content form is ready in the meantime. Another fun thing to do is you can start with a screenshot. So I'll use another Next.js user as an example, which is fortune.com, shout out to them, they built a slick website. But let's say that I'm actually wanting to break into the news business. So I'm just going to paste a screenshot. I could have also attached a Figma file. And I'm going to have Vizero already knows, Vizero can answer questions as well about the engineering design product world. So like I can ask Vizero, what is a newsletter explained with a diagram? use Lenny as an example. So Vizir is also a knowledge seeking tool, but we do strongly steer the tool to create things. So if I paste a screenshot, as you can see, it's cooking on creating a hopefully awesome news website. I specifically ask because I think it's funny to explain a newsletter with a diagram. So this, this you can create again like explanations, content, knowledge. The creator is Lenny. You were a former Airbnb product lead. I guess I should have used some examples from Airbnb, by the way. But let's look at here at what it created with fortune. So notice that the, I'm just noticing now the, The cyber should have been on the center. Let's use the, I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Let's use the refinement tool to center this. I call this, by the way, one of the hardest problems in computer science is actually centering things.

With CSS.

That's right. Centering a div. And in fact, look at it. It was a div. Notice that I did a sort of inline prompt. And the difference between v0 and a lot of other tools is that, yes, you do have the code and code is very important, but I call it code last rather than code first. You're living in the product. So it's centered that another website that I love also built with Next.js is Semaphore. So I really like their Sepia style. So I'm going to say, apply this style instead, including...

So you're sharing a screen. So you used a screenshot to design, to build the site and I'm asking a different screenshot to tell it will make it look like this. Yes.

And so the idea is that the zero can grok different aspects of what it needs to build. It can be functional aspects, it can be layout aspects. One of the things that's also very important to know is we influence the model. So a lot of the things that you would have had to prompt you might get for free. One that's important to call out is responsiveness. So as an example, if I notice that if I do this, it's going to make it work quite well in mobile. is going to give me that hamburger menu. I can now tell it, like, apply that style to everything. In the meantime, I'll show you. This is actually, to me, very, very impressive. And I don't know why today I'm so fixated on the theme of sepia. But notice that not only did it change the background, I hope people can notice this, it applied it to the checkboxes, and it applied a CSS, I'm assuming this is a CSS filter. Yeah, it applied a CSS filter just for the sake of it, because I'm a nerd, I'm going to look at it. But yes, it applied a CSS filter. Confession time, I actually didn't know that there was a sepia function in the filter property of CSS. There were many ways to accomplish this. you could have also written the images or the videos to a canvas and like apply all kinds of algorithms and whatever.

I like that it did it more elegantly than you would have.

Yeah, exactly. So that's why you can't be too opinionated with the tool. So another cool thing is I do like showing screenshots, but I do want to remind people that the idea is not to clone other people's websites. Necessarily, right?

Like- It's just a cool demo.

It's a simple way to show off what it can do. Exactly, like take screenshots of your own things, right? Take screenshots of your artboards, take screenshots.

Of things that people post in Slack. And also don't hesitate to add functionality. Incredible. Thank you for doing the demo. I'm just trying to imagine having an engineer I'm working with asking them to do these things and not only just how annoying that would be, like make it Sepia, but just how much time it would take from, okay, do this.

Thing, copyforture.com, it'd be like days, weeks.

Here it's just months. We'll check it out here. Months, if ever.

Maybe it never ships.

That's right. Something that I noticed that I loved at the beginning when you were doing the prompting and that prompt improvement feature is it basically is like best practices to make it look good and look better, which I think is one of the more interesting, I don't know, levers to working with AI is it just has best practices to help you build things that are Beautiful and also feels like there's this opportunity of just like helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea. Like what is the problem you're trying to solve? Like it feels like there's a PM1 pager step that should exist. Like how do you know this is a problem? What have users told you? How many people have told you this? Things like that.

Yeah, there's something to be said about the fact that over time we're more and more peeking into the mind of the AI. That in itself is becoming a killer feature. So the deep seek stream, the thinking tokens moment was a very big moment for industry, I think, because open AI did have the technology, but they decided that for competitive reasons, which, you know, are, it's a reasonable thing to think. No pun intended. They were going to withhold it. And also it wasn't clear there was going to be product and user and product utility. But when DeepSeek hit, it was very obvious that people really liked the idea of understanding how the AI thinks and influencing where it should go. We've gotten actually amazing feedback and bug reports where people actually specifically point out, look, this is where the AI went wrong. Please fix it. So the more people we get on this product, the more thumbs up, thumbs down, the more user feedback we get. And by the way, I'll tell you, for people out there building products, my number one guidance or piece of advice I would give to any startup founder was create a lot of opportunities for people to give you feedback inside the product. I drew inspiration from Stripe, and this was amazing for the early days of our sale. There was a feedback button with a very slick with four emojis that would allow you to decide how you were feeling about the feature, the product at that very moment. And that would go straight into Slack. And we were building day in and day out, just like streaming users thoughts right into our consciousness. And maybe we would get, I don't know, like tens, hundreds a day, especially in the early days, maybe like a couple a day and whatever. When you're building AI products, it's a constant stream of user feedback. So for people that are thinking about not building AI products, it's going to be hard to compete with something that has such a tight feedback loop with users. The whole idea is to capture users' feedback so the next iteration of the model, the prompt, the fine tuning, the examples, the rag is better. And one of the things that Vercel has done as a result of this insight is we've open sourced a lot of what makes V0 work. So let's say that you wanted to create the V0 for doctors as an example. You can go to vercel.com/templates and you can clone a ChatGPT template that basically follows all of the best practices in the world for really high performance awesome UIs, and now you can go out and build your own AI products. We've also open sourced the AI SDK, which is a foundational plumbing of d0. It allows you to connect any model and generate UI from its responses, not just output text, but actually generate UI. So maybe because I love showing stuff, I'll just really quickly show you this. I'm kind of excited about it.

Let's do it.

So if you go to chat.versell.ai super quick, you're going to see this is the open source chat GPT demo that we've built. It can, you can ask questions like old school LLM, but also you can ask, let's actually finish this. Let's ask, what is the weather in San Francisco? We call this generative UI. It's responding not with just plain text, it's creating components as a result. Last but not least, and this is the sort of bezer style opportunity, let's ask it to help me write an essay about Silicon Valley. It's going to create a canvas or artifacts style experience and everything is generative. But also users can edit, refine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking about. There's all these startups that are building vertical AI tools. This got like a little bit of a tangent. And there's always this like AI stuff for lawyers, AI stuff for doctors, nurses. And the pitch there is that these are going to be founders that know a lot about the specific problem in this market. And so they'll build like the tools that are very specific to that.

Yeah, I'm absolutely convinced that expert AI tools are the future. There's an amazing product being built on Vercel called chatprd.com It's the V0 for writing PRDs and it's going to get a V0 integration soon so that you can write your PRD with AI and then you can deploy to create it with AI. That's just an example of like a vertical that you can go after. There's also open evidence It's like the ChatGPT for doctors, actually. There is an amazing startup building x-ray AI tooling. So the ideas, I think, are infinite. And what I've seen from users of AI at Vercel, for example, our legal team loves this tool called getgc.ai. They could, in theory, go to ChatGPT to ask legal questions, but someone out there decided, I'm going to build the best legal AI tool in the world. It's going to be up to date. I'm going to obsess about this problem. The CEO herself is a lawyer. So it's going to be hard to compete with that, I think.

But here's what I'm thinking. This is almost the opposite, and I'm curious to get your take, but let's not spend too much time on this.

Because it's a complete change.

No, no, I love it. So you showed me the weather widget that you just built. Basically, it's like a little mini app that the AI built as you're talking to it. Is there a world where when AGI is far enough and approaching super intelligence, can it just build you a Harvey, for example, in real time? Here's the best experience for a lawyer. Here we go. We got it for you.

Totally, totally. I believe that eventually, yes, but humans will always want to have some guardrails. The reality is that Get GC is taking a double job. One is making the best tools for lawyers possible. But also putting their weight behind it, saying like, we've actually used this and we believe that this is what the future should look like. There is a sense of direction and opinion about things. And I think left to its own devices, AI, I don't know, this is the double edged sort of like prompt embellishment. AI doesn't always know exactly what we want or what we need. It's still very much a co-pilot, a partner, an assistant is not really running our lives. And I don't know that we even would want that ultimately.

Okay, I'm going to go in a whole different direction, which is taste. We hear this word taste all the time. It feels like a thing that people are always suggesting this will continue to be an important skill to know what is good, basically to know what people are likely to find valuable and good. And I know I Clearly you have great taste. You're building incredibly beautiful products. V0 is clearly, it's like the most beautiful by default builder out there, as we've seen. So in terms of building taste, people are always like, how the hell do I do that? I have great taste.

I know I do.

I don't need to. How have you built taste? How do you think that is? How do you think you've built taste?

And any advice for folks that are trying to improve their taste? Yes, I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. you need to get yourself out there. I think it's very important to go back to that sort of like, get into the world, ship things, don't be hesitant of self-promotion in a way. So being very honest with yourself, like building something, getting it out there, see how people react, go back to the drawing board. I think it's about exposure. At Vercel, we have one of our sort of internal operating principles as Increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products, even to watch how people use other products. And you'll develop that muscle. Taste sometimes, I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that it can develop. And again, the AI will help you a lot here because we try and capture some of the universal principles of it. But there's also Trends in the world, right? Like I'm not.