Architecting for model step-changes: A fireside with Vercel's Guillermo Rauch

1. SPSpeaker0:00

   [upbeat music] Please welcome to the stage CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, and Head of Product, Claude Platform at Anthropic, Angela Jiang.

2. AJAngela Jiang1:27

   [audience cheering] [upbeat music] G, thanks for joining us.

3. GRGuillermo Rauch1:31

   It's great to be here, IRL.

4. AJAngela Jiang1:33

   [laughs] Yes, G has, uh, sent me many requests for things-

5. GRGuillermo Rauch1:36

   Yeah

6. AJAngela Jiang1:36

   ... uh, over text. Um, so now we can do this in person in front of, uh, a bunch of people. Um, all right, folks. Uh, so I'm Angela. Um, I'm from Anthropic, and, uh, you know, everyone knows G.

7. GRGuillermo Rauch1:48

   [laughs]

8. AJAngela Jiang1:48

   Uh, incredible, incredible, I think, thinker, builder, uh, creator of some of the most popular, uh, like, technologies, and I think been really incredible to actually see Vercel become, I think, uh, you know, a place and a provider of technology that almost s- so many startups and so many creators and builders have come to to actually build their agents, build their products, experience a lot of the kind of more, I think, like, AGI-pilled, um, types of, uh, experiences out there. Um, I actually would love to maybe, you know, kick us off with, uh, kind of your point of view on, um, you know, how you've seen kind of Vercel, like, transform. And I know you've kind of publicly talked a little bit about, or actually a lot about, how AI is super transformative to technology, super transformative to the way that we build these things, and maybe give your perspective on how Vercel sees that, um, and how you kind of take that in internally as well.

9. GRGuillermo Rauch2:42

   Yeah, it's, it's interesting because when, when Vercel was born, the idea was to remove any friction between an idea and bring it online.

10. AJAngela Jiang2:51

    Love that.

11. GRGuillermo Rauch2:52

    And the tools that we had to do that were... I mean, maybe to summarize it, it was developer experience. Many people credit us with introducing the developer experience obsession to cloud infrastructure, and the, and the mission was to just make it more generally available. Like, if you only knew front end, for example, React was the bet that we placed for the most part of the time.

12. AJAngela Jiang3:14

    Mm-hmm.

13. GRGuillermo Rauch3:14

    If you, if you could only learn JavaScript and React, now maybe you can wield infrastructure that before that was only available to the massive mega manga-

14. AJAngela Jiang3:25

    Mm-hmm

15. GRGuillermo Rauch3:25

    ... or FAANG or whatever you call them these days, those kind of massive corporations. And fast-forward to today, I think we're still focused on this idea of bridging idea to reality, but we have these new amazing superpowers. It's like you've been playing an RPG game and, like, super weapons dropped.

16. AJAngela Jiang3:44

    [laughs]

17. GRGuillermo Rauch3:44

    And that's agents and AI. So I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about agent ergonomics-

18. AJAngela Jiang3:52

    Hmm

19. GRGuillermo Rauch3:52

    ... and the developer experience for agents. And we're now living in a reality where that group of people that could deploy to the cloud is out infinitely bigger, right? With tools like v0 and Cloud Code, you know, you hear every single day of your life now that everybody can ship. So it's been an accelerant of our mission, but it's really changed how we think about building. And, and the thing that we're narrowly focused on building now is what we call agentic infrastructure. So, uh, being the best partner infrastructure to tools like Cloud Code, helping you deploy agents, and then also turning the infra itself into an agent.

20. AJAngela Jiang4:31

    Mm.

21. GRGuillermo Rauch4:31

    Meaning think of... Imagine if the cloud itself can self-heal, self-optimize, self-configure, and so on.

22. AJAngela Jiang4:39

    That's incredible. Um, I think one of the things that really stuck with me when, and you know, some of the, I think, c- concepts that you've kind of described publicly has been the idea of, like, sort of a AI, like, software factory.

23. GRGuillermo Rauch4:51

    Mm-hmm.

24. AJAngela Jiang4:51

    And I know Vercel has been, uh, I think many of us know you for incredible products that you put out there for builders, but also even internally, I think you guys are incredibly agent-pilled, um, and very, very fast-paced and very, um, you know, innovative in that space, and would love to kind of hear how do you guys create agents internally, even for yourselves in your own workflows?

25. GRGuillermo Rauch5:10

    Yeah. I, I, we're very agent-pilled because we, we lived through the experience [laughs] of using agents and becoming more productive ourselves, right? Uh, one of the core thesis of our product development philosophy is, you know, we try thing... We try a lot of things internally at Vercel.

26. AJAngela Jiang5:25

    Mm.

27. GRGuillermo Rauch5:25

    And whenever something works, we become big advocates. We build around it. So I remember, for example, when I first got access to Cloud Code, uh, preview release, uh, Mikey invited me to it, and I grew very strong conviction that it wasn't just gonna be, uh, for example, front-end engineering. It's n- it wasn't just gonna be, um, you know, auto-completion on a c- on a code editor, that this was fundamentally a new way of even automating your computer and your operating system.

28. AJAngela Jiang5:53

    Mm-hmm.

29. GRGuillermo Rauch5:53

    Uh, that the CLI was a very beautiful layer of abstraction to sort of agentify everything. And what I did is I told the entire company, "You know, unlimited token budget. [laughs] Go and use all of these tools."And one of the things that's happened since then that I think has surprised me, it has formed and crystallized this idea of the AI software factory, is that people have used tools like CloudCode and v0 to build their own tools.

30. AJAngela Jiang6:17

    Yeah.

Episode duration: 27:15