Guillermo Rauch: Vercel CEO on how v0 hit 3,200 PRs merged per day (and lets anyone ship)

1. 0:00 – 1:22

   Introduction

   1. GRGuillermo Rauch0:00

      I'll say one thing about vibe coding: it's really easy to go from zero to one. I think we've all seen the demos of, "I prompt something," [chuckles] and it's cool. I think what's harder is to iterate on a project at scale and to deploy changes safely. Every marketer at Vercel wants to change this page at some point, and the old way was one of two ways. One is what I call you had to petition to the government. You had to go to engineers and say, "Engineers, can you please add a logo over here?" or whatnot, or pray that the CMS was perfectly wired up for any ambition, or dream, or idea you had. So now they can just open this page in v0 and prompt anything that they want.

   2. CVClaire Vo0:38

      It reduces the friction of getting something live really, really low. The humiliation ritual of prioritization goes away, and you can actually focus your time on defending the merits of an idea, on the actual idea, as opposed to the hypothesis of the idea that then has to be implemented. And so I think it changes the speed of companies in a really significant way. [upbeat music] So this is truly a first-time vibe podca- podcast that we're doing together, and I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Claire Vo. I'm a product leader and obsessed with AI, and I have a podcast, How I AI, where I teach people how to build better with all these new tools, including ones that

2. 1:22 – 4:40

   Overview of skills.sh

   1. CVClaire Vo1:22

      we're gonna see today, and I'm really excited to have you here, Git. First, we're just gonna get to the, the thing that everybody's wondering about: What is your most favorite feature that you released this week on v0?

   2. GRGuillermo Rauch1:35

      Well, I'll tell you, the hottest thing in AI today is skills. Everyone is excited about the fact that we can now augment agents, and AI applications, and agentic engineering with skills, like, skills that the model doesn't yet have. And so we launched skills.sh, and the beautiful thing about what we'll show you today is that v0 can seriously go from prototype all the way to production. So we're able to conceive changes to things like skills.sh. I'm gonna show you really quickly. Skills.sh is a new... You can think of it as like npm. It's a hub, an open ecosystem of skills, and it's pretty dramatic what's happening to this site. So you can see that we now have 34,000 skills submitted by the community, and this website has gone viral all over the internet. It's hosted on Vercel, but the most exciting part to me is that it was conceived in v0.

   3. CVClaire Vo2:34

      I have a quick question for the audience: How many of you have installed a skill in the last week?

   4. GRGuillermo Rauch2:39

      Oh, wow!

   5. CVClaire Vo2:40

      Okay, a lot of people.

   6. GRGuillermo Rauch2:41

      Skill build.

   7. CVClaire Vo2:42

      Um, how many of you have the top three installed?

   8. GRGuillermo Rauch2:44

      [chuckles]

   9. CVClaire Vo2:45

      Actually, top, top five. [chuckles]

   10. GRGuillermo Rauch2:46

       It's very heavy at the top, right?

   11. CVClaire Vo2:47

       Top five.

   12. GRGuillermo Rauch2:47

       It's like these are ripping.

   13. CVClaire Vo2:50

       Oh, now I have bo- top seven. Okay, yeah, I have the top seven installed right now.

   14. GRGuillermo Rauch2:55

       Very cool.

   15. CVClaire Vo2:55

       Um, this is a really great resource. So for folks that are wa- maybe watching this later or haven't been familiar with Skills, Skills is now this standard that a lot of these agentic frameworks are using to help you repurpose and reuse best practices, step-by-step flows. And so, for example, I use this Remotion best practices one, um, to let me import components and regularly create videos really, really quickly, and I would not have been able to do this without the expertise that's been packaged in these best practices that were installed with one line, um, using skills.sh.

   16. GRGuillermo Rauch3:31

       I think it's-

   17. CVClaire Vo3:32

       Yep

   18. GRGuillermo Rauch3:32

       ... also worth noting-

   19. CVClaire Vo3:33

       Yep

   20. GRGuillermo Rauch3:33

       ... maybe to peel the covers of-

   21. CVClaire Vo3:35

       Yep

   22. GRGuillermo Rauch3:35

       ... how Vercel builds products.

   23. CVClaire Vo3:37

       Yep.

   24. GRGuillermo Rauch3:37

       Like, skills.sh was a thing that was just conceived at the moment of inspiration. We started prompting, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool-

   25. CVClaire Vo3:44

       Yep

   26. GRGuillermo Rauch3:44

       ... if this thing took shape?" Would it... We discussed, for example, what it should look like. We, we've been calling this a style terminal core 'cause it looks a little bit like... This was my contribution to the project. I was like: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we make the top of the website look like a terminal?" And so the, the, the process itself of building this was very much prompt driven, I'll say. Like, chatting in Slack and saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be nice if we had a hub for this?" Just very iterative, very collaborative between the team members at Vercel. And what's really cool about this, m- again, is that it's really fast, so it takes advantage of all of the Vercel infrastructure primitives. Even though it has 35,000 of the skills, like, if I start, like, like, hardcore scrolling this [chuckles] and then pick a random one... All right, Swift, Taylor Swift. You're gonna see, like, the page transitions are, are... It's probably Swift UI, okay. But, uh, like, all the page transitions are instant, production-grade. It needed to scale. There were gonna be a lot

3. 4:40 – 6:40

   Demonstration of v0’s GitHub integration and branch creation

   1. GRGuillermo Rauch4:40

      of eyes on this thing.

   2. CVClaire Vo4:41

      Okay, so I think we wanna get to our first workflow for How I AI, and, and you just wanna show us how you either developed this or how you and the team improved this over time using the tool.

   3. GRGuillermo Rauch4:51

      I'll say one thing about vibe coding: It's really easy to go from zero to one. Like, I think we've all seen the demos of, "I prompt something," [chuckles] and it's cool. And I think what's harder is to iterate on a project at scale and to deploy changes safely. In, in the case of how we work on Vercel products, we always work on branches, and we take advantage of branch previews, and then we code review, and then we merge them. So we're basically gonna be showing you today is how we brought those ideas of hardcore, heavy-duty, production-grade engineering to v0 itself. So I'm here, I'm finding that same project that you just saw. Skills.sh, which is piped into... It's basically backed by Git. The engineer who built this pushed some code three hours ago, and you have this new button within v0, which is New Branch. So what this is showing you is that ver- v0 is making the Git flow of creating branches a first-class citizen of the product. So I'm gonna create a branch.... And basically, this is gonna give me the same sort of, like, chat experience you're used to, but notice here at the top, I get this beautiful new convention of project/branch, right? So I have the v0/rauchg branch, and here within the preview, you're gonna notice that just like if you had cloned the project to your local device, we both have a full, full-scale, uh, VS Code editor, as well as the real project running within v0.

4. 6:40 – 9:05

   Exploring the v0 development environment

   1. CVClaire Vo6:40

      One thing I wanna pause and notice, because I just have a laser eye for product, is I love that you use the convention that all of us with engineering teams use on our Git branches-

   2. GRGuillermo Rauch6:49

      That's right

   3. CVClaire Vo6:49

      ... which is who's the contributor slash what's the feature.

   4. GRGuillermo Rauch6:53

      That's right.

   5. CVClaire Vo6:53

      And so what I think this is really interesting, you know, we're gonna talk about how you actually use these tools to build, but I also think there's a flip side of how you design great, um, AI products and agentic products, and I still like the small design tweaks that make something like a v0 feel like a collaborative teammate on your pool.

   6. GRGuillermo Rauch7:10

      That's right.

   7. CVClaire Vo7:10

      So I- for all the engineers out there, I, I noticed-

   8. GRGuillermo Rauch7:13

      Nice

   9. CVClaire Vo7:13

      ... I noticed that little convention. [chuckles]

   10. GRGuillermo Rauch7:14

       So I, I, I-- And what you're gonna see in the design philosophy of the product is that we really wanted to embed those little details of what makes a real engineering workflow come to life, but in a really easy way, right? Like, at the end of the day, I didn't have to go to a terminal or boot up GitHub Desktop and branch manually like it's the Stone Age. I just press a button, and now I have a branch running. So the, the main idea here is that within this preview, I have the full skills.sh project running. It downloaded dependencies. It installed the exact versions of Next.js and every dependency, uh, within the project. I have it all running here. I have it obviously within a staging or dev sort of environment, and now, you know, I, I could navigate it like, uh, I could navigate the production website. I could explore it. I could, you know, use all the capabilities that v0, uh, brings to the table, but I figured let's actually build a feature that we could ship to prod.

   11. CVClaire Vo8:14

       Yeah, and one thing I wanna pause on, what you, I think, glossed over a little bit, which is the fact that you have this VS Code instance, the fact that you have all your dependencies installed, the fact that this is running both with code and a preview. For anybody who's less technical out there, and maybe a lot of your users that are using v0.app are less technical, this, even, like, downloading VS Code, getting your local environment set up ... Like, I spent this morning with my designer installing Homebrew, like, like, it just wasn't on her laptop, and so-

   12. GRGuillermo Rauch8:43

       It's nightmare fuel.

   13. CVClaire Vo8:44

       It's nightmare! And so if you're trying to step from this, like, vibe coding prototype in-web experience into feeling more like a software engineer, without having to have Claire handhold you through, like, brew install, this gets you, like, halfway there. And so I think there's also this learning aspect of it I wanna make sure people don't miss,

5. 9:05 – 11:18

   Building a rating system feature for skills.sh

   1. CVClaire Vo9:05

      but let's get into building something on this.

   2. GRGuillermo Rauch9:07

      Okay, so one-- another part of our product development process is really listening to community and listening to customers. So people have been asking for a lot of different tools so that we could guide them towards knowing if a skill is high quality, vetted, verified, 'cause there are so many skills. At last we checked, there were five hundred skills being added [chuckles] every hour. And so one of the ideas that we came up with is, like, could we add, um, a rating system? So let's add a five-star-based rating system for the skills, uh, put it on the sidebar. Um, be mindful, so I'll also give you, like, a little bit of my real-time consciousness on if I were talking to an engineer and say, like: What could go wrong if we accept ratings from the internet? One of the things [chuckles] that can go wrong if you accept ratings from the internet is abuse. So let's say, let's tell v0, be mindful that, uh, we should rate limit or prevent abuse on the scores that we receive. And again, for me, it's all about thinking from a production readiness point of view when I think about the new v0, and make it make sense within the style of this skills website. So-

   3. CVClaire Vo10:26

      What, what I love about what you're showing us is you have this very, very high sophistication prompt here, which is, "Make it make sense."

   4. GRGuillermo Rauch10:32

      [laughing]

   5. CVClaire Vo10:33

      So we have three, three incomplete sentences on a production app serving thousands, millions of people.

   6. GRGuillermo Rauch10:39

      That's right. So let's fire it off.

   7. CVClaire Vo10:40

      And you're gonna fire it off. And while you do this, one of the things I wanna just call out that I think, you know, why this feature is maybe important right now is, I don't know if you've heard, there's, like, this crustacean crawling all over everybody's MacBook Minis, and skills can be a-

   8. GRGuillermo Rauch10:54

      Oh, God

   9. CVClaire Vo10:54

      ... a prompt injection vector for things. And so as you're trying to make sure that this becomes the centralized hub for discovering skills, which I think it's starting to be-

   10. GRGuillermo Rauch11:03

       Yeah

   11. CVClaire Vo11:03

       ... it is upon you to kind of make sure that the quality is there.

   12. GRGuillermo Rauch11:05

       Quality, yeah.

   13. CVClaire Vo11:05

       At least you have the right thing, um, right things in place, so people can make decisions.

   14. GRGuillermo Rauch11:09

       And also maybe to, to follow with your analogy, this is a little bit like we're vibe coding on top github.com or npmjs.com.

   15. CVClaire Vo11:17

       Yeah.

   16. GRGuillermo Rauch11:17

       It's, like, a really, really big

6. 11:18 – 13:20

   Testing the new feature in the preview environment

   1. GRGuillermo Rauch11:18

      deal. All right, so I was w- gonna walk you through what v0 is doing, which, of course, if you've used v0 before, w- everyone does the whole, like, talk over the thinking charades because agents are not the fastest, but I do wanna point out a few things that are really important. So, um, v0 is all about leveraging the integration and marketplace capabilities of Vercel. So in this case, it knows what the data source is of this project, right? We're storing data in Redis by AppStash. Obviously, it's gonna go through the whole file system. It's gonna try to interpret my requirements. This is already, like, really nice to see that it's not inventing a new way to store the data. Like, it's actually paying attention to the data that I use.... um, and so we'll take a look at, uh, again here. Like, we- it actually gave me something that [chuckles] meets my requirements, right? Like, it fits within the design style. I can submit a rating. It is stores the rating, so I have now my five-star one rating. I guess I'm gonna-

   2. CVClaire Vo12:19

      It's terminal core.

   3. GRGuillermo Rauch12:20

      It's terminal core for real.

   4. CVClaire Vo12:20

      You got your mon- mono-space font.

   5. GRGuillermo Rauch12:22

      Um, let's refresh the page to see that persistence actually works. Beautiful. There's a tiny bit of layout shift that triggers my neurosis, so we'll tell it, "Hey, when we don't have data, make sure there's no layout shift." By the way, for those of you that are, like, less neurotic, I guess, so it bothered me that when we refreshed the page, when we didn't have data, again, like, it jittered the sidebar a little bit, so we're just gonna have v0 cook on that.

   6. CVClaire Vo12:49

      So while, while we're, uh, jibber jabbering, while the- it's thinking, which I have to get very good at as a podcast. So I will call out that I have observed a Vercel internal hackathon-

   7. GRGuillermo Rauch12:59

      [laughing]

   8. CVClaire Vo12:59

      ... and I have seen this man screenshot, like, rounded corners that are not right and just put them in the chat with, like, a question mark. And so-

   9. GRGuillermo Rauch13:07

      Explain.

   10. CVClaire Vo13:07

       I, it's, it's... Yeah, and it, it speaks to my, um, my very attention to detail heart-

   11. GRGuillermo Rauch13:14

       Yeah

   12. CVClaire Vo13:14

       ... that you saw, you saw that.

   13. GRGuillermo Rauch13:15

       Let's see.

   14. CVClaire Vo13:16

       Did it work?

   15. GRGuillermo Rauch13:16

       Yeah, no, I'm fairly satisfied, like, the-

   16. CVClaire Vo13:18

       Yeah

   17. GRGuillermo Rauch13:19

       ... the skeleton was stable.

7. 13:20 – 15:25

   Creating a pull request and deploying to a preview environment

   1. CVClaire Vo13:20

      It stuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   2. GRGuillermo Rauch13:21

      Uh, zero layout shift. So let's continue with the- we, we talked about this, uh, hardcore, uh, engineering workflow. Like, if, if we were making a change like this on skills.sh, again, receiving hundreds of skills per hour with lots of visitors, we first wanna make sure that things work, right? And right now, you, you can think of this as a very capable dev environment. We're booting up the Next.js dev server in a virtual machine. It's, it's, it's basically very true to the actual end result. In fact, thank you to the Next.js engineers who sweated all of the details of mirroring to the best of their ability, the dev environment and the production environment. But there is another layer of assurance that we can get, right? Which is, so if you're more familiar with the Gi- like the GitHub world, the GitHub side of things, you know that when you push a new PR to GitHub, the- this beautiful Vercel bot comes to sort of save the day, right? You know that it builds what you, what you're changing, and then it previews it. Not only that, but notice that v0 really cooks. v0's making me look so good here-

   3. CVClaire Vo14:31

      [laughing]

   4. GRGuillermo Rauch14:31

      ... 'cause I haven't written a PR description in, like, twenty-five year- eighty-four years. So v0, uh, produced a PR, described it, um, and then the magic of Vercel is coming in, right? So it's giving me that, uh, preview. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna open it here, and I'm gonna say Visit preview.

   5. CVClaire Vo14:48

      I, I'm just, again, I'm gonna be a software engineer for a second. Can we appreciate how quickly that preview branch deployed?

   6. GRGuillermo Rauch14:54

      [chuckles] Well, don't trigger me, 'cause it can be ten times quicker, but yeah, uh, I'm proud of it. [laughing]

   7. CVClaire Vo14:58

      Question mark, explain.

   8. GRGuillermo Rauch15:00

      Now I have a production-like environment, so when you see this URL ending on .vercel.sh, .vercel.sh is our enterprise Vercel environment. That's why I had the seventeen steps of logging in. Um, but this is basically running on the production-grade CDN, on the production-grade rendering infrastructure, hosting infrastructure, et cetera. So now when I'm seeing that, you know, rating there, I have pretty, pretty good confidence.

8. 15:25 – 17:48

   How Vercel is using v0 internally for production work

   1. GRGuillermo Rauch15:25

      I was like, "Yeah, this is shippable."

   2. CVClaire Vo15:26

      Okay, so I have to ask a couple questions about the, you know, inside the house view of this. Is this how you all are shipping code, or is this a big chunk of how you're shipping code to this? Is it a hundred percent? How are you actually using this for production?

   3. GRGuillermo Rauch15:40

      So it's really interesting. We- when we cook on a, on a project or a product internally, we hold ourselves to the same sort of high bar as if you had launched a product externally, 'cause you wanna make sure that people are actually adopting it, right? And so before, before we started chatting, and I'm gonna give you a glimpse of, again, the behind the scenes of Vercel. Uh, we've talked a lot publicly about our data analyst agent, v0. Yes, we're very creative with in- with names. We take the first initial, and we add a zero. So this is our data, uh, AI-powered assistant, and I was actually asking it, um... I said, um, "v0," this is me, by the way, "uh, tell me about PRs merged with v0 in the recent weeks. Tell me about its growth." So again, PRs merged with v0 is a totally novel thing, and v0 cooked. Thank you, v0. It said, "PRs merged via v0 have seen explosive growth in the last week." Wow, explosive growth!

   4. CVClaire Vo16:39

      I have to appreciate whoever prompt-

   5. GRGuillermo Rauch16:41

      [chuckles]

   6. CVClaire Vo16:41

      -managed this one because it did not put the explosion emoji in there, which I think would also trigger G. [laughing]

   7. GRGuillermo Rauch16:47

      All right, we should, uh, yeah. Uh, trigger warning. Starting from near zero in early January, the feature hit thirty-two hun- hundred PRs merged per day by January twenty-eight, twenty-nine, which is basically today, an extraordinary [chuckles] hundred X. The bots, the AIs do like to like, like, yeah, like sweet, sweet talk us, but, um, it's, it's pretty amazing. So this is in very, very, very early, uh, preview, right? Like, we- we're just letting people in. But, I mean, this is just such a beautiful workflow. I mean, imagine triggering a task like this from your phone, from Slack, from v0.app. Another convenience that we're adding is that you can take a, a, uh, GitHub repo like this, and I can go to the homepage, and then I can paste it. And so now I could import something that I already have and create a chat from it. So any time I have an idea for a real-world project and product that Vercel has in production,

9. 17:48 – 22:04

   Organizational adoption and cultural impact

   1. GRGuillermo Rauch17:48

      I can now prompt. So I estimate that this is going to change fundamentally how we work, right? Uh, it's also very visual in nature, which is really cool. Obviously, there's a lot of ways of like getting preview- getting, uh, changes made by agents today out, out there in the world, 'cause, uh, everyone's very excited about what, what AI can do.... but this is actually showing me the, the actual results and, like, things that are gonna happen. So I, I grade this really high for the kind of products that we build at Vercel, and, uh, I expect this to continue to have a lot of traction.

   2. CVClaire Vo18:18

      So I have to ask you, sort of operationally, how do you imagine companies do this? And one of the things that I'm thinking is I was chatting with Caroline, who interrupted you all and say we're- said we're gonna start the podcast, and she said last night, "I was prepping for this demo, and I v0 coded something, and somebody saw it and was like, 'Well, that's a good idea. You should just mer- [chuckles] merge it and ship it.'" Like, do you imagine, or inside, inside the company, who's shipping code? How are you enabling that-

   3. GRGuillermo Rauch18:44

      Yeah

   4. CVClaire Vo18:45

      ... as a CEO? How does the culture support it?

   5. GRGuillermo Rauch18:47

      So here's the thing.

   6. CVClaire Vo18:47

      How does it not?

   7. GRGuillermo Rauch18:48

      Until now, everyone could cook, right? Everyone could create a prototype, a new design, a suggestion. In fact, uh, moment of vulnerability, 'cause I haven't really even opened this in a while, but, like, uh, let's see if I have... I've probably created a bunch of things that I've been suggesting to the teams that we could look at, right? Um, [chuckles] ignore this one for a second, but, um, so if any time I have an idea on how to improve the product, I nowadays create a v0. Now, the difference is that until I had this mechanism to hand it off as a pull request to the engineering team, then I was kind of like playing in la-la land. I was, like, in out there in this, like, prototype world, and now we have a common foundation and a common substrate so that if you have an idea, whether you work in marketing-- and marketers always wanna change the website. Like, imagine, [chuckles] like, go to vercel.com. I'll show you a page that is actually quite, uh, fun at Vercel, so our Enterprise page. Every marketer at Vercel wants to change this page at some point, right? And the old way was o- to one of, one of two ways. One is what I call you had a petition to the government. You had to go to engineers and say: "Engineers, please, [chuckles] can you, can you please, uh, add a logo over here?" or whatnot, or pray that the CMS was perfectly wired up for any ambition, or dream, or idea you had. So now they can just open this page in v0 and prompt anything that they want, but it would be somewhat irresponsible to just ship it, right? So with a Git workflow, and opening up PR, and being able to preview it, we can all build confidence that it's gonna be a good change, roll it back if needed, and, and again, this is a website that's, that's pretty, pretty large.

   8. CVClaire Vo20:37

      What I think is fun about this from an org perspection- perspective is it reduces the friction of getting something live really, really low, right? And, like, the humiliation ritual of prioritization goes away, and you can actually focus your time on defending the merits of an idea on the actual idea as opposed to the hypothesis of the idea that then has to be implemented. And so I think it changes the speed of companies-

   9. GRGuillermo Rauch21:02

      Yeah

   10. CVClaire Vo21:02

       ... in, in a really significant way.

   11. GRGuillermo Rauch21:03

       And you worked, I mean, to say the least, at LaunchDarkly.

   12. CVClaire Vo21:07

       Yeah, yeah.

   13. GRGuillermo Rauch21:07

       And you know that a true production-grade release process-

   14. CVClaire Vo21:11

       Yep

   15. GRGuillermo Rauch21:11

       ... involves things like feature flags-

   16. CVClaire Vo21:13

       Feature flags, yep

   17. GRGuillermo Rauch21:13

       ... and experiments, and things need to be measured, and there's events that are critical to report from these product surfaces. And so this is also where I see the, um, skills that we can add to v0, and that you can contribute yourself to play a very important role. Because sometimes, you know, like, w- we're all operating on this, like, websites, and pixels, and whatnot, and we say, like: "Ah, it's, it seems easy. How risky could it be to move this button 20 pixels to the right?" And so I think we can make vibe coding scale to that kind of rigor that exists within enterprises and companies a- at scale.

   18. CVClaire Vo21:48

       Well, and if we're being honest, on that enterprise, it's not gonna be moving a button two pixels, it's going to be switching the emphasis. I know this, 'cause I've spent my life in enterprise. Switching the emphasis between contact sales and-

   19. GRGuillermo Rauch21:58

       [chuckles]

   20. CVClaire Vo21:58

       ... view the product.

   21. GRGuillermo Rauch21:59

       That's right.

   22. CVClaire Vo21:59

       There's gonna be a perpetual debate which one's the primary call to action-

   23. GRGuillermo Rauch22:03

       That's right

   24. CVClaire Vo22:03

       ... and which is the secondary.

10. 22:04 – 25:17

    Favorite non-coding AI use cases

    1. CVClaire Vo22:04

       [chuckles] Okay, I- we- so we've shown, uh, new v0 import GitHub, which I think is really great. Do a pull request, copy and paste your GitHub URL in to import it, actually push to production, make friends with your engineers. Three-sentence prompting, no more than that. I wanna go to quick- 'cause we wanna keep this tight, I wanna go to a quick lightning round with you and ask you a couple different AI questions.

    2. GRGuillermo Rauch22:27

       Sure.

    3. CVClaire Vo22:28

       So what is your favorite non... I mean, everything's a coding use case, I'm sure, with you, but what is your favorite non-coding use case of AI?

    4. GRGuillermo Rauch22:36

       Well, I'm conflicted. My mind immediately went to image generation, because I use- uh, so we built that banger playgrounds. Uh, I don't wanna share screen again. I wanna take it from you, but-

    5. CVClaire Vo22:47

       This is... Oh, no, I was just gonna say, image generation is how I got this pretty, pretty background, um-

    6. GRGuillermo Rauch22:51

       Uh, v0 Nanobanana Pro dot Vercel app.

    7. CVClaire Vo22:53

       Oh, Nanobanana.

    8. GRGuillermo Rauch22:54

       So what's really cool that's happening at Vercel today is that we're building so many of our own internal tools and agents, and so we're building our own design tools. Like, for example, to create new images, we created a playground for Nanobanana, and I use that a lot. So I use it to make memes. Uh, guilty as charged. Uh, but I also use it when I wanna present information in really cool ways, when I tweet, when I sometimes have to make a- present my vision in a way that's more like on, on the image side of things. I combine it a lot with v0, because Nanobanana is really good at, like, again, letting me fire off 20 generations in parallel and then pick the one that I actually like, and then I toss it into v0, and then I actually get more fidelity of what I wanna implement. So image generation is, is a big one, but also I'm very excited about video generation. We're gonna be dropping something, I don't wanna spoil it too much, uh, we're gonna be dropping something, uh, on the video side as well. Um, and but, yeah, all, all AI is... [chuckles] Uh, I also, I also kick off a lot of research tasks, like, long-horizon research tasks. Uh, yeah.

    9. CVClaire Vo24:01

       So one of the things I wanna call out from a Nanobanana perspective on our podcast is I've used Nanobanana to turn every conversation-- I think we're now at 118 workflows. Every AI workflow that we talk about on the podcast gets its own-... pretty consistent Nano Banana in- infographic. [chuckles] And so I just think there's just such undervalued use cases in both video- i- uh, image and video gen, and I'm about to take this and turn them all into little-

    10. GRGuillermo Rauch24:25

        Yeah

    11. CVClaire Vo24:26

        ... vi- mini videos, as you can.

    12. GRGuillermo Rauch24:26

        We also created a really awesome... I don't know if we've written about it yet, or we're gonna publish on the blog post. We have an, uh, OG image, like a, a open graph card, Twitter card generator that we use internally, that combines, uh, more traditional rendering techniques, but also image generation. So a bottleneck in our team was sometimes literally like, "Can we get that social card to get the announcement through the door?"

    13. CVClaire Vo24:47

        Yeah.

    14. GRGuillermo Rauch24:47

        And so now we- uh, we've also sort of automated and agentified that. Every day, we're basically asking ourselves: How can we build an agent that takes over a task that we were previously giving to a person? And, uh, and typically, the person that was working on that task [chuckles] is now the one creating the agent.

    15. CVClaire Vo25:05

        Yeah.

    16. GRGuillermo Rauch25:05

        So, uh, something we said at the beginning is, we want v0 to be really awesome for you all to create agents, not just traditional web applications. So that's, that's basically the, the, the rundown of the product.

11. 25:17 – 27:57

    AI-powered chess game built with v0

    1. CVClaire Vo25:18

       So I have to say, uh, my favorite... So that's your favorite use case. My favorite use case of your use of v0, which I don't know if you're, you're prepared for me to have this much knowledge about what you vibe code, is your agent-to-agent chess game.

    2. GRGuillermo Rauch25:32

       Oh, yes.

    3. CVClaire Vo25:32

       My kids are obsessed with this. They think it's- 'cause they got the AI chess board.

    4. GRGuillermo Rauch25:37

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    5. CVClaire Vo25:37

       And now they're, like, playing chess at various levels of-

    6. GRGuillermo Rauch25:39

       By the way, I learn a lot. So, so it's really cool. Like, during the holidays, I, uh, I'm a, I'm kind of a visual person.

    7. CVClaire Vo25:45

       Yeah.

    8. GRGuillermo Rauch25:46

       So the chess AI thing has been done before, but I imagined this sort of, um... Imagine like ESPN is, is, is, is broadcasting a, a final of a chess match, and they're going over the shoulder of each player and showing the, the, the chess board, obviously in 3D. And so I, I figured, could, could v0 generate 3D code, right? Could it render with Three.js and things like that, a, uh, a live chess match? And could it have two AIs battle it out? And so, um, and I mean, you could open it, so v0-chess-match.vercel.app. Um, and the other thing, the other thing, I wonder if I'm SEO'd or not. Um-

    9. CVClaire Vo26:30

       You were, you were... No, you were number one. Good job.

    10. GRGuillermo Rauch26:32

        Oh, yes!

    11. CVClaire Vo26:33

        Uh-

    12. GRGuillermo Rauch26:33

        So-

    13. CVClaire Vo26:33

        ... a little terminal core over here. [chuckles]

    14. GRGuillermo Rauch26:35

        So terminal core, of course.

    15. CVClaire Vo26:37

        [chuckles]

    16. GRGuillermo Rauch26:37

        But, uh, so what I did is, I, I, I started streaming the thinking tokens of the models. Uh, apologies to Google in advance, uh, we're using a very old model of theirs that is really cheap, but they're losing to 2,200 to five. At least they got five in. So you can see the thinking tokens of the models. This is combining all of the Vercel AI infrastructure. It's using a workflow, so the game could run forever. The game could literally run forever or, or until like-

    17. CVClaire Vo27:05

        Let me guess

    18. GRGuillermo Rauch27:05

        ... 100 tokens. Um-

    19. CVClaire Vo27:06

        AI Gateway.

    20. GRGuillermo Rauch27:08

        Uh, AI Gateway, of course, because we can change models. Like, we could, we could see, like, Brock versus, you know, uh, whatever, uh, what dropped this week, Gwen 3 Max thinking. Uh, but also I learned chess incidentally, because not from these guys, these guys are kind of dumb.

    21. CVClaire Vo27:23

        [chuckles]

    22. GRGuillermo Rauch27:23

        But, uh, you can see how it thinks through what piece to move, and it says, "Oh, no, because if I move it there, I'm gonna get F'd, so I need to do this." So this is a fun v0 created during the holidays.

    23. CVClaire Vo27:36

        Yeah, so I need a kid core version of this. Um, I also wanna see how much these models are spending to beat and lose, lose-

    24. GRGuillermo Rauch27:42

        Well, that's-

    25. CVClaire Vo27:43

        ... against each other

    26. GRGuillermo Rauch27:43

        ... beautiful thing about the AI Gateway, is that we kinda report-

    27. CVClaire Vo27:46

        Yep

    28. GRGuillermo Rauch27:46

        ... you know, for this prompt, how much did it cost you with this model, et cetera. Um, but see, so this is GPT open source, which is actually pretty decent and, uh, pretty cheap,

12. 27:57 – 31:44

    Teaching kids about coding with AI

    1. GRGuillermo Rauch27:57

       so.

    2. CVClaire Vo27:57

       Great. And then so on this top... So that's my kids' favorite, your v0.

    3. GRGuillermo Rauch28:02

       [chuckles] Nice.

    4. CVClaire Vo28:03

       I don't know if they have a favorite, my v0.

    5. GRGuillermo Rauch28:04

       It's popular, it's popular with kids. I also got, uh, another parent reach out to me and say, like, "Oh, this really inspired us, and we're gonna use v0 together-

    6. CVClaire Vo28:10

       Yeah

    7. GRGuillermo Rauch28:10

       ... to create more things."

    8. CVClaire Vo28:11

       My kids, uh, uh, uh, DAU on v0, don't worry about it. So this is my second question, which is: What is the last thing you built with your kids that was really fun?

    9. GRGuillermo Rauch28:20

       So the other day, I brought them all to the office, and what we started vibe coding is... So now we wanna do things that are more like physical AI. Like, bring AI to the real world, I think, is the next frontier. And so at the office, we have a, a thing called Vestaboard, which is a board where you can basically render things- [chuckles]

    10. CVClaire Vo28:38

        Yeah

    11. GRGuillermo Rauch28:38

        ... in the real world. And I think I really broke their, their brains that day. Not all of them, 'cause I, I brought four of them, and one was on his iPad, not paying attention. It was almost like bringing them to Sunday school, for what it's worth. Uh, but two of them [chuckles] were like: "Holy crap, you can type in code, and then you can change the real world?" So I kinda taught them the concept of an API. Uh, and yeah, all vibe coded, and, um, I, I took one of the nannies, too, and she was mind-blown.

    12. CVClaire Vo29:05

        Well, that is-

    13. GRGuillermo Rauch29:06

        I remember teaching everyone how to vibe code.

    14. CVClaire Vo29:07

        That is... I- you and I, we're like twin stars here-

    15. GRGuillermo Rauch29:10

        [chuckles]

    16. CVClaire Vo29:10

        ... because while you have the Vestaboard, which is pretty big, I have this, like, tiny, like, 32-by-32 pixel fake little mini computer that my kids and I are, like, vibe coding-

    17. GRGuillermo Rauch29:20

        Nice

    18. CVClaire Vo29:20

        ... little screens on and little games on. So I completely agree. Take it off the screen for many reasons, if you have kids.

    19. GRGuillermo Rauch29:26

        Yeah.

    20. CVClaire Vo29:27

        Put it in the real world.

    21. GRGuillermo Rauch29:28

        Yeah, yeah.

    22. CVClaire Vo29:28

        And you can do some fun stuff and blow their mind.

    23. GRGuillermo Rauch29:30

        The idea of, like, sending a packet and responding to it. And the beautiful thing about v0 and things like this is like, you're literally speaking English to the computer. So I think if you can teach them that they can express their thoughts and desires, then they can make anything happen.

    24. CVClaire Vo29:44

        Okay, important question: Are you teaching your kids to type?

    25. GRGuillermo Rauch29:46

        That's a tough one, because I was... When I grew up in Argentina, my dad got me this soccer game. He tricked me. I thought, "Oh, he's getting me FIFA or something cool." No, he got me a soccer typing game. [chuckles]

    26. CVClaire Vo29:58

        [chuckles]

    27. GRGuillermo Rauch29:59

        So to score, I had to type really fast, and that's how I learned to type really fast. But nowadays, like, they're kinda getting really into the, the speech-to-text thing. I need to find that hack where I'm like, "Oh, I got you, Roblox," and it's not, it's just typing.

    28. CVClaire Vo30:11

        It's just typing. So I, uh, I, I'm tricking my youngest right now. We have a Switch-... and I really want to play Ocarina of Time for people that were born when that game came out a million years ago. And the only reason I let him play it is it's, like, 99% just reading.

    29. GRGuillermo Rauch30:27

        Nice.

    30. CVClaire Vo30:27

        And so I'm like, "You can play this very slow-paced game-"
13. 31:44 – 34:43

    Troubleshooting techniques when AI gets stuck

    1. CVClaire Vo31:44

       and deployed on, obviously, Vercel. Okay, last question: Uh, do you, when you're frustrated, prompt AI the same way I have seen you prompt in Zoom chat, which is- [laughing] ... explain. How do you, how do you-

    2. GRGuillermo Rauch31:58

       Question mark.

    3. CVClaire Vo31:58

       How do you... Yeah, a question mark. Like, what do you do when it's not giving you what you want?

    4. GRGuillermo Rauch32:02

       So I, I do think that what we- we're dropping now is gonna help you so much for the moments where- I mean, let's be real. You can get stuck with AI, right? But now that you can essentially have this full, like, let's call it escape hatch, right? Like, you can-- If you want, you can clone the repo and keep cooking on your local machine, or if you need some- someone else to help you, this is fundamentally a collaborative medium. That's the thing that GitHub unlocked for the world, collaboration between engineers, designers, marketers. And so, um, I, I foresee that a lot less people are gonna get stuck, frankly. The models also keep getting smarter. Skills is gonna help you a lot as well. So I'll give you an example. We are always adding new frameworks and new capabilities, and XJS is getting more powerful and the AI SDK. Now that we have skills for those, that we're gonna preload into v0, the model itself is not gonna get as stuck as easily, 'cause now it has more resources to, like, figure out how to solve that problem. Another thing that I've done, it actually used it for this project. So there's a lot of subtleties about this, this 3D thing that I didn't know anything about 3D. So whenever I would get stuck, I would ask other models. Um, I think it was something about, um, the way that, and kudos to the, um, awesome soul, the, the, the gentleman that, uh, open sourced the 3D. So I got it from, uh, Sketchfab, and he didn't design this for creating a game or anything like that, so all of the pieces were stuck together. It was almost like you had 3D-printed it, and the pieces were stuck together with the board. And so I... Obviously, I, I want that sweet animation that when the model decides, it moves the piece, right? Um, and so I had to ask a lot of questions to other models about, "Hey, teach me what's going on with this 3D thing. How do I, how do I reason about it?" And then I would copy what another model tells me, and I would toss it into v0. [chuckles] So, uh, another thing that you can do when you get stuck is y- y- she, she can't see it here because it's only for me, but there's a debug button. And what the debug button says, I asked v0, "Hey, give me debugging tools so that I can visualize the mesh of the 3D model. I can visualize- I can turn the textures on and off." And so the, the AI itself can help itself and can give you tools to debug problems, which is kind of meta, but try it, try it, and it's gonna work well for you.

    5. CVClaire Vo34:26

       Okay, so you a- you ask an expert, which is another model-

    6. GRGuillermo Rauch34:29

       That's right

    7. CVClaire Vo34:30

       ... and you find out the right question to ask. Well, this has been very fun. Thank you for showing us a little bit behind the curtain of how you use v0, all the new stuff, some of the ways you use it in your personal life and fun projects. We love to see

14. 34:43 – 43:35

    Final thoughts and audience Q&A

    1. CVClaire Vo34:43

       it. So you have this new v0, you have this room full of people. What do you want from them? What, what can they do for you?

    2. GRGuillermo Rauch34:48

       I mean, get busy shipping. So try it out, uh, give us feedback. Uh, we will fix it as very, very fast because we're gonna be dog- eating our own dog food. Uh, and, yeah, share the things that you built, uh, with v0.

    3. CVClaire Vo35:02

       Oh, we have a question back here. Oh, I love it!

    4. SPSpeaker35:04

       So I had a question. Thank you for sharing, like, the feedback process, how you loop, um, in terms of, like, from ideation to, like, production. Like, during that process, do you do any, like, product-market fit? How do you validate that what you're trying to build is actually, like, useful or, um, impactful for, like, your ecosystem?

    5. GRGuillermo Rauch35:23

       Yeah, super hot-off-the-presses, new sort of mental model that we've been using internally. There's a customer zero and a customer one. Customer zero, we like to it to be ourselves. We, uh... It's like the Rick Rubin, the confidence in our ability to know what's good, whatever. Like, we like our taste. We, we've been around the block for a while. We want to- We have ideas of products that we would like to see out there in the, in the universe. Uh, but customer one is also really important, like a close design partner, Claire Vo.

    6. CVClaire Vo35:54

       Oh.

    7. GRGuillermo Rauch35:54

       Claire v0. And our, uh, Claire and our, our CPO are constantly texting.

    8. CVClaire Vo35:59

       We're on a, we're on a text chain, yeah.

    9. GRGuillermo Rauch36:00

       She, she, she texts about reports. She texts things she needs. So having that group of design partners, enterprise companies, individuals, community members, people that slide into my X DMs. So it's- You always wanted that pressure test, uh, of, of the world. And for skills, it was that, you know, people telling us, "Hey, like, why does Opus 4.5 kind of know the latest XJS, but not really? And how can we embed-"... your best practices. So that was kind of like in, in our backlog, like we're, we were thinking about that problem for a while, but then it also became really concrete. We were like, "Okay, how would we go about distributing and discovering these skills?" And so sort of the idea became very concrete, and that's where a tool like v0 really helps you. Because when you want to extract out of your mind, you can just v0 it. And so pretty much what you see today, it started with, like, four or five v0 prompts in a conversation with our VP of design, who then took it away further and made it actually good, and, um, and, uh, our, our CTO and our, and our product leader. So you mentioned about VMs. Is there a possibility of having React Native in v0? So what you saw today is if you, if you, if you peel the covers of how v0 is built, it's built on a bunch of Vercel infrastructure that you also all have access to. The, the virtual machine that we use to run that Next.js preview is called Sandbox. So the Vercel Sandbox, and it's a very powerful computer. In fact, what's actually making agents really capable is not that they're perfect, is that they have a computer at their disposal in order to solve every- any problem. So the reason we showed you a glimpse of how we work internally with v0, the reason v0 is so good at data analysis is that it has a computer where it can do research, it can write Python code, it can run it, it can make a lookup to Snowflake, it can search the web, it can come back, it can fix... It, it's like a, it's like a four or five-minute process, right? And so these computers are very powerful, general-purpose computers. You could imagine them running React Native. You could imagine them writing other programming languages. They can ob- obviously already write Python and run it, and so the sky's the limit from that perspective.

    10. CVClaire Vo38:11

        I have a question on that topic. Is there gonna be a point at which v0 is gonna help you build those agents?

    11. GRGuillermo Rauch38:16

        Oh, absolutely. So the main, the main idea of this chess thing, it's cute, but I mentioned the word workflow. So it's actually freaky for me to say this program is gonna run forever in the presence of network or compute failures. So in fact, like, uh, you know, we're, we're doing this live and just randomly came up with the idea. The reason I had confidence the demo was gonna work is that if an LLM provider is down or a function call dies or times out or whatever, the workflow engine of Vercel will say, "We're doing live. We're gonna try it again, and we're gonna try it again, and we're gonna try it again." What we're gonna help you do is create those kind of workflows from within v0. A lot of agents need that kind of reliability. For example, you send a message from Slack, and you say, "@ClaireGPT, go and spec out this PRD for me."

    12. CVClaire Vo39:12

        Yeah, it's called @ChatPRD. It is running on workflows, and- [chuckles]

    13. GRGuillermo Rauch39:16

        Yes. We didn't rehearse this.

    14. CVClaire Vo39:17

        Yeah. So we, we do have, we do have, uh... I, I feel the pain on, on agents where, um, workflows are really helpful because they give you durable overtime execution. You can retry things. Things can fail. You can do them sequentially.

    15. GRGuillermo Rauch39:30

        Yes.

    16. CVClaire Vo39:30

        You can do all sorts of things, and so I do think the ability for you to build that on the back end is very helpful for-- even for applications that don't have the same kind of UI that you would have it.

    17. GRGuillermo Rauch39:38

        Totally, 'cause some are, some are very visual, and some are gonna be more headless. Like, some are gonna be background agents that are doing work for you.

    18. CVClaire Vo39:48

        Yeah.

    19. GRGuillermo Rauch39:48

        In fact, the world is excited about the artist formerly known as Quad Bot.

    20. CVClaire Vo39:53

        Yeah.

    21. GRGuillermo Rauch39:53

        Molt Bot. I don't know what Molt Bot means, by the way.

    22. CVClaire Vo39:56

        Well, uh, crustaceans... This is how you know you have kids in, like, elementary school. Crustaceans, like, lose their shell, so they molt.

    23. GRGuillermo Rauch40:03

        And they molt. All right.

    24. CVClaire Vo40:03

        Yeah.

    25. GRGuillermo Rauch40:03

        Right, right.

    26. CVClaire Vo40:03

        It's like a snake.

    27. GRGuillermo Rauch40:05

        Yeah.

    28. CVClaire Vo40:05

        [laughing]

    29. GRGuillermo Rauch40:06

        Got it.

    30. CVClaire Vo40:06

        And then-

Episode duration: 43:35