The Future of Code Generation | Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel | Ep. 20

Guillermo Rauch 0:00 You've been coding for hours and hours, and he didn't even know what the output was. He was just impressed by the fact that someone could be so locked in. And so I think programming taught me that. It taught me how to focus. It taught me to be disciplined. It taught me to receive this negative feedback from the compiler and overcome it. I do think, you know, we'll need to find what the next version of that is, 'cause I don't think it's gonna be programming necessarily. [upbeat music]

Jack Altman 0:23 All right, Guillermo, thank you so much for making the time for this. I'm really excited to chat with you today.

Guillermo Rauch 0:26 Same. People are excited on X as well,

Guillermo Rauch 0:28 so. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 0:29 So I want to get into codegen, uh, but before we go there, can you talk about what you worked on before Vercel, you know, with Next.js, other projects, and maybe how that fed into what you've built at Vercel?

Guillermo Rauch 0:39 Yeah. I had a startup before Vercel that I exited to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, and it was quite a successful journey for me because it was my first startup. It's nice to have an exit, but also one of the meta things that I learned... I was a CTO. One of the meta things that I learned is, as a CTO, how can you, you know, influence your team in the best possible way? Like, they are gonna engineer the right things, they're gonna have the best tools. The one thing I did that was revolutionary for my team was spending a lot of time in getting the CI/CD process, meaning continuous integration and continuous deployment of the code that they would write, get it as efficient as possible, meaning you write a little feature, you push code to Git, you get a URL back. I built a real-time system. My background was in writing real-time frameworks, so I was obsessed with real-time streaming of data, and so people would, uh, push to Git, and then I would give them this URL that had a commit ID dot- my company was called LearnBoost. I think it was like learnboostdemo.com. And so imagine that you're almost editing the internet in real time. That was the feeling that I wanted to give my employees, and obviously, I did a lot of other things. I chose technology stacks and whatever, but when I would ask my colleagues, like, "What was the thing that, you know, was most impactful to your- in your time here?" It was that iteration velocity, the, the deployment velocity, the tooling being really neatly configured. I always do the exercise in my head of you show up to a new company. Isn't it nice that Apple kind of figured out operating system and hardware, and I give you a new laptop? Actually, you look- you probably- I don't know about you, but I look forward to having a new laptop.

Jack Altman 2:18 It's the best.

Guillermo Rauch 2:19 It's so [chuckles] new and nice.

Jack Altman 2:20 Unbelievable.

Guillermo Rauch 2:21 And that's only because they figured out this bootstrapping problem-

Jack Altman 2:24 Mm

Guillermo Rauch 2:24 ... of, like, everything is ready to be used. I wanted to give that feeling, but for your development tools, to my team.

Jack Altman 2:30 Versus-

Guillermo Rauch 2:31 And that's-

Jack Altman 2:31 ... you get a new devi- you know, you're setting up a whole environment, and it takes forever.

Guillermo Rauch 2:34 Yeah, yeah, you install these twenty million things-

Jack Altman 2:37 Yeah, yeah

Guillermo Rauch 2:37 ... fight the tools-

Jack Altman 2:38 Takes you two days

Guillermo Rauch 2:38 ... and then maybe you get to work on something.

Jack Altman 2:41 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 2:41 And so that was by far the most impactful thing that I did, and I wanted to- You know, it was sort of subconscious at the time, but essentially, I wanted to turn that into a company.

Jack Altman 2:50 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 2:50 I couldn't wait to... You know, you have that insight because then I kind of saw that not every company had that. WordPress was really good at deploying WordPress.com, but I noticed that if you had a new idea and you needed to bring it to life, and, and it kind of makes sense, like, they'd evolved to host a really important dot-com, and so they hadn't thought about that zero-to-one experience for any new idea that a developer would have. And so when I realized that, it dawned on me, I couldn't wait to leave and, and say, "This could be a huge business opportunity," because the cloud was starting to take off, and the cloud was known also for its reliability, robustness, its scale, et cetera, but it felt like the opposite of using [chuckles] a new computer. That is, like, just point and click. It was this really difficult process of configuring and figuring out instances, and, and so sort of in parallel, it was this convergence of ideas. Make developers really productive and happy, give them the best possible tools. I built Next.js, but also figure out that cloud part that a lot of companies would put off until too, too long. Like, you get to the point where, you know, I meet companies that are operating at massive scale that are afraid of deploying-

Jack Altman 3:55 Mm-hmm

Guillermo Rauch 3:55 ... companies that deploy once a quarter, companies that do code freezes for weeks, months around Black Friday and things like that. So this was not obvious to me. I kind of discovered that when I started Vercel, but I thought it was all gonna be about the instant feeling for developers, which is a big part. But then, as I started talking to enterprises, it was this idea that as they become bigger, they become stagnant, they become ossified in their old infrastructure choices, and you could imagine now with AI, that problem is 10X in, in terms of importance. Like, we have models coming out every day. [chuckles] There's just, like, two new open-source models last week. Imagine a company that is ossified in its deployment and infrastructure

Guillermo Rauch 4:32 choices.

Jack Altman 4:32 When you started Vercel, because you had this background, did you have most of the insights that turned out to be true about what Vercel was, or was it much more of, you know the problem area, you know some of these customers, but you figured it out as you went?

Guillermo Rauch 4:46 I had a lot of things that were based on first-principles thinking, so literally m- measuring the speed of light and how fast can you shuttle files on a laptop-

Jack Altman 4:56 Hmm

Guillermo Rauch 4:57 ... to a container in the cloud that starts a build process, and how fast is that build process gonna be? It's funny, I was listening to DHH on Lex Fridman, and he was saying the gold standard of DX was set in the '90s by PHP. PHP is a technology that only required of you to modify files in a folder. Imagine Dropbox, if Dropbox was a live deployment. You go [chuckles] into the magic folder, you edit a file, and it's live on the internet. And so that was, from first principles, I was chasing that dragon.

Jack Altman 5:25 Hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 5:26 There were a bunch of things that I didn't know. I think Vercel ended up focusing a lot on the front-end side in the beginning of our journey. Uh, I realized that the biggest gap was, or the biggest opportunity, I would say, was backend code was really important, but the differentiating experiences of the internet were more front-end heavy. So when you look at something like ChatGPT today, a lot of what it's doing is happening right in front of your eyes in real time.

Jack Altman 5:51 Mm.

Guillermo Rauch 5:52 It's thinking, it's streaming, it... You, you start working on a document, and it splits the application in two, and there's a live document here. You cannot do those things without powerful frameworks that are focused on the front end, and that was the alpha in the market. Like, if I had come to market with, like, again, another runtime like PHP, people would be like, "Ugh, I have to learn a new language, and what's in it for me?"... And so anytime you bring a new tool, it's like a big ask of the world. You have to learn a new thing. You might have to migrate. This is like, it's the M word. [chuckles] It's like, it's like you tell an enterprise you have to migrate. So what, what's in it for me?

Jack Altman 6:28 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 6:28 And what we realized, I actually posted some stats today that were bewildering about a really large retail chain that moved on to Vercel recently. I realized that by giving people the great developer experience, but without business outcomes, it was also gonna be an incomplete equation. So when you move to Vercel, you now realize business outcomes. Your stuff gets faster, your stuff gets more dynamic, you're able to iterate faster and, like, build AI products. So that didn't come, like, overnight, obviously, and it's very hard to bootstrap the zero to one, but the idea that it can give you receipts, I think is pretty no- novel in the cloud itself.

Jack Altman 7:05 Mm.

Guillermo Rauch 7:05 The cloud, in fact, in its initial conception, has a really bad financial equation because companies have data centers, they've spent tons of money in buildings, in racks, in servers, in storage appliances, in people. And then you ask them, "Okay, begin the journey to migrate to the cloud."

Jack Altman 7:24 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 7:24 "Okay, cool. So now I'm gonna pay for all of that, and concurrently, I'm gonna pay for the cloud bill. Cool, and what do I get at the end of it? What am I gonna see?"

Jack Altman 7:31 Right.

Guillermo Rauch 7:32 And so I think what's benefited me is I've always been a really visual design person. So if there's not-- if there's n- nothing I can see or feel at the end of that rainbow, then this software engineering project was just, you know, kind of pointless to me. And so we focus a lot on actually working backwards from your resulting URL that you deploy in Vercel. Even if you didn't do big A/B test studies and whatever, it's just gonna feel better. And then we're gonna teach you how to work backwards into the technology so that you start from that strong starting point of user experience. I think it's totally novel in the cloud. Like, the cloud has always been about implementation, details, and primitives, and Vercel made it about products and

Guillermo Rauch 8:13 experience.

Jack Altman 8:14 I think that's a good transition moment because what you talk about here is, you know, starting from the end and then working backwards, and I think a lot of codegen is, in some ways, you know, there, there's maybe some analogies there. That was a lot about the beginnings. Now sort of fast-forward all the way to today, where I think codegen, you're kind of at the center of both the thinking and sort of where the technology will be. Two things are true: One is there are a lot of people that sort of have shared information about how, you know, you go out and you test what developers are actually doing with the products today, and it's not working in such bewildering ways quite yet. You know, like, there was a study recently sharing that, like, people thought they were twenty percent faster, turns out they were actually twenty percent slower.

Guillermo Rauch 8:57 Yeah.

Jack Altman 8:57 Which seems like, you know, very surprising in some ways, but, you know, we talked about this, and it actually wasn't that surprising to you. But on the other hand, there's, you know, probably never been a market, at least that I've seen, that has more excitement, more market pull. Companies are scaling revenue-

Guillermo Rauch 9:12 Yeah

Jack Altman 9:12 ... probably faster than anything in this space. And so, um, h- how do you see the state of affairs like today?

Guillermo Rauch 9:20 Yeah.

Jack Altman 9:20 Like, you know, like, what's going on out at the offices in here, like this exact hour?

Guillermo Rauch 9:24 This is a super hot topic because at Vercel, we monitor the idea of landing something very closely. Like, to us, it's not just about writing the code, it's that you land it, and in fact, you higher the bar for what you consider to be landing, the better for you.

Jack Altman 9:39 Landed means fully deployed and usable?

Guillermo Rauch 9:41 Even better. Like, landing it means that you've seen some business outcome, like user adoption.

Jack Altman 9:46 Okay, so all the way through the funnel.

Guillermo Rauch 9:46 Right?

Jack Altman 9:47 Yep.

Guillermo Rauch 9:47 And again, this is not always easy to do because you also have to balance it with, like, a healthy dose of, like, shots on goal, but you have to be disciplined about what it means to land your software. And again, this is just from that principle of always working backwards from, like, there is some pixels on someone's screen that also will result in some kind of business outcome, you know, conversions, sign-ups, new information, vibes, whatever you want to call it, but I just encourage people to think about the idea of, like, landing. And I do think one of the emergent things that we're seeing is there's almost, like, a bottleneck in landing today. It's almost like code generation has been solved. Everyone's sharing their stats. "About fifty percent of my company, the code is coming from AI. It's eighty percent, ninety percent." So I do think we have to be rigorous about, well, do you just have a bunch of PRs that nobody is reviewing?

Jack Altman 10:35 Do you feel that way? Do you feel that code generation is, roughly speaking, solved at this point?

Guillermo Rauch 10:39 So let me give you a framework of how I think about it. I think on one extreme of the equation, we have vibe coding and tools that cater to a very broad set of users. That's where v0, our, you know, agent lives, and you see products in this category that are saying: "You don't need to know how to code. Everybody can cook," is kind of our, our motto, right? So you go to v0, you put in a text prompt, and we create an application. On the other end of the spectrum, you have an engineer that's been working a twenty-year-old code base, and they want to, quote, unquote, "write code faster."

Jack Altman 11:14 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 11:15 They have a solid mental model of how the code works. Obviously, there's gaps in their knowledge. They might be more new to the team, you know, they might be more senior. They might forget certain things. So there's a lot of gaps that AI-- I call this AI-assisted engineering or agentic engineering. There's an engineer that's sitting on that chair that is being augmented by AI. And so when you look at it from this perspective, I think, you know, you hear it as a statistic of more and more of this code bases that people are working on, the code review, the patch, is increasingly coming from AI rather than the human. And so the reason I think code is-- I, I can see the line of sight of when code gets fully solved, is that we will continue to make the models better. They'll get statistically more aware of all of the patterns in the world. This is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? The models are learning from all the code that we're writing, from the code that gets rejected, from the code that gets accepted.... and so more and more of this code, I think, will straight up come from the agent. The problem that I'm seeing today is that for the most mature engineer projects, it's unclear that the human can fully trust the outcome of the AI, meaning that, yes, we're generating a lot of PRs, we're generating a lot of code. The bottleneck has shifted to reviewing that code.

Jack Altman 12:40 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 12:40 I've been sharing an anecdote that I heard a couple weeks ago from a company in the ecosystem where, you know, the agent generated a PR. It did exactly what the engineer wanted to do. So this is the mode of thinking where, like, the AI is just reading your mind, but you're giving it a b- little bit of direction, and so you're like, as an engineer, you're like, "Oh, thank God!" But the AI deleted a crucial line of code. This happens a lot with models, by the way. You, you take Sonnet, and you realize that it's good at instruction following, but it's not perfect.

Jack Altman 13:10 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 13:11 It kind of goes off the rails just a little bit. In a very heavy-duty, mission-critical production code base, one line of code can literally mean the distinction between, like, the whole internet goes offline or everything works perfectly. One line of code could be a cloud infrastructure file that deletes a critical resource or a line of authentication code. You've been seeing some vibes shift a little bit on the, is the code that gets generated by AI secure on X and so on. And so when that PR went to review, I think this is what we-- where I think a lot of the, the focus will shift, and, and, and we're certainly making a lot of investments here. We need to have agents give you a higher baseline of confidence that the code change is actually good-

Jack Altman 13:59 Mm.

Guillermo Rauch 14:00 -that it's safe, that it follows best practices, and so we have agents producing the code. I think now we're gonna have agents reviewing the code, and again, the, the, the human being needs to be there still in the loop.

Jack Altman 14:12 Does this problem have anything to do with who wrote the code in the first place, or is this merely just a problem that exists for a large code base? In other words, like a, a, a thirty-year-old company that's now trying to use AI, that is, you know, making mistakes as it's trying to navigate the code base. Is that a different thing than a large new code base today-

Guillermo Rauch 14:30 [chuckles]

Jack Altman 14:30 -that was generated by AI code, or is it not relevant?

Guillermo Rauch 14:32 I think so. I think so. One of the things that we do with v0, and again, because we cater to everybody and not just developers, is we're more opinionated. So I think the way that this world is gonna split is that when you're building a vibe coding platform, you're more vertically integrated. Because if you're more vertically integrated, and I'll make it this really concrete, v0 produces Next.js code. Vercel builds Next.js. We have integrations into a particular set of database partners, so we can continue to work very, very, very closely on monitoring these known quantities, and actually, I think that if you take that more constrained approach, you could actually exceed what a human being is capable of. Because I can take all of the best practices of security in the world, and I can embed them into the model, and the model can now say, "Okay, like, I will refuse to do something that's really dumb from a security perspective." Now, consider this world where you need the model to be almost like beyond super intelligence. You need it to know the entire history of your business, all of the semantics of the code. It needs to know runtime interactions of that code, because keep in mind that just working on the code base is a very incomplete model to go off of. The human is thinking about all the known data that happens at runtime. Obviously, you kinda-- it's kinda sloppy, realistically, [chuckles] because, like, you kinda know about it in your brain. You know, "Oh, our baseline throughput is a thousand requests per second, so I have to be really careful in the algorithm that I'm writing in this hot path." How does the LLM know about that? The LLM would actually have to ingest all of the runtime data. Think of it as, like, piping all the logs and metrics, et cetera, into the-- into its brain, and then it also has to know about every possible programming language, cloud platform, deployment tool, et cetera, et cetera. And so you also asked something that I thought it was really interesting. You said, "Is this different for companies that are adopting AI today, and, you know, they've been writing code for decades?" I do think there's also a, a human habit delta. I think there's people right now that are being born into this world.

Jack Altman 16:41 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 16:42 And so they will learn the ins and outs of how to be careful and wield this tool correctly or not. But I do think that we're all learning as we go. You know, like, the jury is still out in, like, what is exactly, you know, AI engineering one-on-one? [chuckles] Like, there's almost like you still need a curriculum, which kind of defeats the point of the ideal of like, "Oh, you don't need humans."

Jack Altman 17:02 Totally. It just seems like if there's, like, a whole new way to build a house, and you have new people going in, and they get to start from scratch-

Guillermo Rauch 17:08 That's right

Jack Altman 17:08 ... and they only know the new way-

Guillermo Rauch 17:10 That's right

Jack Altman 17:10 ... versus an old, you know, house-

Guillermo Rauch 17:12 That's right

Jack Altman 17:12 ... that you need to go completely retrofit, and the people working on it are learning the new tactics.

Guillermo Rauch 17:16 That's right.

Jack Altman 17:16 Seems like it'd be very different.

Guillermo Rauch 17:18 Totally, and I, I think what we're seeing from the Next.js side, I actually literally tweeted earlier this morning, like, there should be a convention for, uh, agents to advertise to tools that they're agents and not humans wielding the tool. So the, the tool itself can be polymorphic. It can work, it can adapt itself a little bit differently when it's being wielded by the agent. So if, if you're building a house, and you're a human, I give you the hammer that is adapted for, you know, your motor skills and the shape of your hand. But if you're an agent, you're like, you know, awesome, [chuckles] and you're like, uh, from a motor skills perspective, you can hold twenty hammers at the same time.

Jack Altman 17:55 Yeah. Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 17:55 So I, I will expose a different interface, and this really uncovers a, an enormous potential that exists today, which is the idea that you can create a whole new set of languages, runtimes, and frameworks that are custom-tailored for agentic engineering, and so that goes back to, like, our vision with v0, is that it actually could be the case where almost like a self-driving car, the self-driving car-... you know, in its, uh, version today, has some limitations. Waymo is not, cannot go on the freeway still today, [chuckles] right? And, uh, it's not in New York, whereas Uber just, like, took over the whole planet immediately. But Waymo has a lot fewer incidents. It literally does, does not make a lot of the mistakes that humans make. So I want the tools like v0 to go in that direction, where you're almost constraining in a realistic way what it can do. You're not, you know, overselling its potential, but the things that it does do, it can even exceed what a human would do otherwise by hand.

Jack Altman 18:59 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 18:59 So that, that's the spectrum of flexibility. If you're using, you know, Claude Code or Cursor, anything is possible. Like, you're gonna work on any code base. If you're using things like v0, it's more opinionated. It opens the top of funnel to everybody in the planet, and hopefully, we can continue to steer it to a place where the output quality is almost more of a guarantee. And this is actually also what I would encourage everyone to think about with regards to AI. We need to raise the bar where AI is not just a slop-generation machine, right? Like, we should be thinking kind of like a Waymo. Like, "Oh, look at that. In this dimensions, it's way better than what a human

Guillermo Rauch 19:37 would do."

Jack Altman 19:37 Is your read right now that the overall advantages coming from Claude Code and Cursor and things like that are more self-perceived than genuine?

Guillermo Rauch 19:47 There's a lot to unpack there. I, I was speaking recently to a CIO of a very, very large engineering workforce, maybe one of the largest in the world. You know, there is obviously the cultural resistance to new things, so, like, obviously, you know, there's always that caveat and whatnot, es- especially at this scale. But one of the things that he pointed out that resonated was they spent a lot of time evaluating the perceived versus realized productivity gains of AI tools.

Jack Altman 20:13 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 20:13 And he mentioned that the gap between perceived and realized was extremely significant, meaning that in order to finally roll out the assistance, which they did, people thought, "This is the second coming of Jesus. This is the- is, like, best thing that's happened since sliced bread," when you would ask them from, like, anecdote- anecdotal perspective.

Jack Altman 20:32 Right.

Guillermo Rauch 20:32 But then, when you measure what actually gets landed-

Jack Altman 20:35 Yes

Guillermo Rauch 20:35 ... not so much.

Jack Altman 20:36 And I bet it's because there's, like, a multi-step process, and in some of the parts, now all of a sudden, you're going, like, turbocharged.

Guillermo Rauch 20:43 [chuckles]

Jack Altman 20:43 In other ways, you're going slower than you used to-

Guillermo Rauch 20:45 That's right

Jack Altman 20:46 ... and you just focus on the parts where you started flying.

Guillermo Rauch 20:47 That's right. But also, there's the vibes that are changing, right? And this is where I'll make the anti-case of that. I'll say, look, one of the hardest things about software engineering... And I've always- you know, when people would make the joke of, like, [chuckles] "Developers have it so good. They go to the Google, and they have their lunches made and whatever," that's, like, a perception that built out with, like, the HBO series-

Jack Altman 21:10 Mm-hmm

Guillermo Rauch 21:10 ... and, like, maybe, maybe the people that have never engineered could be, you know, persuaded to think that way. Because you sit on a table, you have your nice laptop, you're drinking your smoothie or whatever, but in reality-

Jack Altman 21:22 There's also the Day in the Life series, you know-

Guillermo Rauch 21:23 [chuckles]

Jack Altman 21:24 ... those, those little videos of people sharing, like, their-

Guillermo Rauch 21:25 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jack Altman 21:26 That was good, too.

Guillermo Rauch 21:26 That's exactly what people, I think, would picture, right?

Jack Altman 21:28 That was great.

Guillermo Rauch 21:28 Like, "I show up to the office-"

Jack Altman 21:30 Those were funny.

Guillermo Rauch 21:30 "I make my tea."

Jack Altman 21:31 Ten thirty. Yeah, it's good.

Guillermo Rauch 21:32 Think about that engineer that I just described, that feels the weight of the world on their shoulders because that line got deleted, and literally what happened as a result of that is one of the world's most recognizable brands in the world dot com-

Jack Altman 21:45 Gets taken down

Guillermo Rauch 21:45 ... went down.

Jack Altman 21:45 Yep.

Guillermo Rauch 21:47 And that, that pressure, that weight, and it's not just even on the runtime and operational aspects, right? It's also, and this is why Vercel, by the way, we, we worked so hard to eliminate those failure modes because of my own [chuckles] experience of, like, what it's like to hold a pager.

Jack Altman 22:02 Totally.

Guillermo Rauch 22:03 It's one of the worst feelings in the world.

Jack Altman 22:04 It's a bit like when, uh... I mean, it's not exactly the same thing, but it's, um, you know, when somebody does some task and gets paid a huge amount for a small amount of time, and they're like-

Guillermo Rauch 22:13 That's right

Jack Altman 22:13 ... "You didn't pay me for that hour. You paid me for, like, the-

Guillermo Rauch 22:15 My entire life

Jack Altman 22:15 ... ten years that I got ready to do that hour."

Guillermo Rauch 22:17 My entire life.

Jack Altman 22:17 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 22:17 This is so true. The operational aspect is just so underrated and overlooked, and but there's also another one, which is the build time aspect, which is, yeah, you are looking at a laptop, but your brain is, like, literally in pain.

Jack Altman 22:31 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 22:31 Just like, the hyper-focused, like, you know, aspy style of, like, I, I can only do one thing at a time, and it's a lot of negative feedback loops.

Jack Altman 22:41 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 22:41 Error, error, error, error, error, error, and then maybe you get it right. Maybe. You could go hours and hours and hours. I sometimes read Slack messages from our engineers, like: "Holy crap, man, I just spent three days just struggling with this problem, and it was this little thing over here." Like, it's just, it's an emotional- [chuckles]

Jack Altman 22:59 That's crazy

Guillermo Rauch 22:59 ... rollercoaster. And now you're lo- n- in this new world of, like, "Agent, do that thing," and now the agent swallows all that nastiness. 'Cause there's a very important thing that has also happened, which is the world has now hardcore upgraded from assistants to agents. One of my internal m- uh, things that I repeat is, like, agent is the new model. If you pay attention, you know, v0 launched a platform API, which is basically like a very high-level agent that you can automate. You can- if you w- if you're Squarespace and you wanted to reinvent yourself, you could use a v0 platform API to create your own website-building agent. If you look at Claude Code, they launched an SDK, and people are integrating it in various ways. So what an agent is, is that it's the LLM on steroids. It's the LLM focused on an output.

Jack Altman 23:52 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 23:53 Because the LLM, when it first appeared, it was focused on request-response. "Write me a poem. Translate this to, to Spanish. Translate it back to English. Make it funnier. Explain it like in five..." So it's, it was all about, you know, you ask for something, you get it back.

Jack Altman 24:07 Now it's get me an outcome.

Guillermo Rauch 24:09 Now it's get me an outcome, and that is absolutely phenomenal because that's how we went from ChatGPT replaces Stack Overflow for asking programming questions to now it's like, "Build me an awesome website."... There's a, there's a really funny meme of a really jacked Chad type, which is, "Build me something. Don't make mistakes." And so going back to the psychology of a developer, think about what that does to you. You went from struggling, this silent struggle that most normies would not know about, to you're just completely in control. And then, so we added a sound to v0 when the generation is completed. People have, have said it's almost like hitting a jackpot, because the [chuckles] sound only happens when the agent went through all those errors, all those intermediate states that a human would have suffered with. And now, okay, on- once we've rendered successfully, we give you the sound. And so now I, I do think we have to study the psychological and emotional implications of that, and also put them into the pile of, like, productivity, because maybe now you feel better and the productivity outcome is unknown.

Jack Altman 25:14 This is sort of a goofy question, but, um-- and I'm not, you know, an engineer, but, um, my, uh, my co-founder was, and a lot of good friends obviously have been. What's been described to me is that struggle, that multi-day struggle, results in the most like, you know, satisfying, happy moment at the end-

Guillermo Rauch 25:32 Yes

Jack Altman 25:32 ... and that that's, like, a big part of the love of the game.

Guillermo Rauch 25:35 Yes. Oh, absolutely.

Jack Altman 25:36 Will we lose some-

Guillermo Rauch 25:37 It's like working out.

Jack Altman 25:37 Will we lose some of that sort of, like, hunt that some people find satisfying?

Guillermo Rauch 25:41 Yeah, I think it depends on-

Jack Altman 25:42 Maybe it doesn't matter.

Guillermo Rauch 25:43 It depends on the individual. So v0 can be used by my kids. V0 can be used by PMs, designers, people that are focused on building products, and so they didn't have that feedback loop of, like, I'm writing code, and I'm a- analyzing the error. There's still a sense of, like, gratification when you get something that matches your vision, which is really powerful. "Oh, now I got... Oh, okay, now I was able to dump my idea into the right prompt, and I steered the agent into the right outcome," and, and there is a huge amount of satisfaction from that. But there is a meta problem here that I do think about, which is that, have you watched WALL-E?

Jack Altman 26:19 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 26:19 And, like, we're floating, like the-

Jack Altman 26:21 Uh-huh

Guillermo Rauch 26:21 ... the future is like- [chuckles]

Jack Altman 26:22 Yeah, exactly

Guillermo Rauch 26:22 ... fat blobs floating and-

Jack Altman 26:23 When, when the hard-

Guillermo Rauch 26:24 Slurping

Jack Altman 26:24 ... at some point in the, you know, we're a long ways away, and we can talk about it, but like, you know, if, if all the hard problems take away, do we become that guy?

Guillermo Rauch 26:31 Yeah.

Jack Altman 26:31 Just, like, sitting back, enjoying.

Guillermo Rauch 26:32 Yeah, I do think about that, and-

Jack Altman 26:34 I think everybody enjoying leisure constantly would be a huge problem. I don't think-

Guillermo Rauch 26:37 It would be a huge problem.

Jack Altman 26:37 I don't think we're going there personally.

Guillermo Rauch 26:39 Yeah.

Jack Altman 26:39 I'm curious if you do, but I think that would be a huge problem if that happened.

Guillermo Rauch 26:42 Some people have brought this up, right? Like, uh, when you're solving all of those programming problems, you are building a stronger mental model of the world. You are discovering patterns, acquiring knowledge, you're testing your discipline. I, I think the discipline part is underrated. Like, I remember my dad, I always remember this one afternoon. I had just gotten my new developer set up. I was super motivated. My bedroom was next to a hallway, and so people would walk past all the time, and I was so locked in, I probably had spent, like, seven hours coding nonstop. And I remember two things: My dad walked in one direction, and then w- he walked back, and to me, it was like ten minutes had passed, and he's like: "Dude, like, how do you do this?

Jack Altman 27:24 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 27:25 You just, you've been coding for hours and hours," and he didn't even know what the output was. He was just impressed by the fact that someone could be so locked in. And so I think programming taught me that. It taught me how to focus. It taught me to be disciplined. It taught me to receive this negative feedback from the compiler and overcome it. And I do think, you know, we'll need to find what the next version of that is, 'cause I don't think it's gonna be programming necessarily. [chuckles] Again, like, all of... I- it's, it was so funny, I still I'm in the game of,

Guillermo Rauch 27:53 like, I try to read every user problem, every error message, everything gets reported on X, I read. And yesterday, I got an escalation from a start-up, it was like: "I think Vercel is broken." And they escalated through the VCs because they wanted to bypass any support mechanism, whatever, and I read the message, and I see the error right there in the message. So it was a complicated stack trace. Uh, for, for nerds, it was a, it was a three, uh, linked error objects, so, like, the stack trace was like, error, error, error, but the error was right there. [chuckles] The explanation was right there for why it happened. There was no problem in our runtime. And again, my posture here is that every problem that a customer has is my problem.

Jack Altman 28:31 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 28:32 In fact, every problem the internet has, I see as my problem. I try to, like, absorb the whole weight of responsibility, but very concretely here, you know, I told the customer, like: "It's right there. It's this." And, and in this case, it was another vendor that was down, re- re- returning a 502 error. And so my lesson from there is that I do think that vibes are shifting. I don't think people are gonna read anymore.

Jack Altman 28:54 Right. They won't even read a single error line.

Guillermo Rauch 28:55 They won't read it.

Jack Altman 28:55 Yep.

Guillermo Rauch 28:56 So again, going back to my model of, like, I'll solve the problem, uh, and then if, if there's another problem, I'll def- redefine the problem to be bigger. We are working on an agent that'll compress any metric anomaly, and so the, the BM working on this was super happy to get my forward-

Jack Altman 29:13 Yeah

Guillermo Rauch 29:13 ... because we're, we're, we're working on basically, I call it going from problems to solutions. The old cloud was problem, problem, problem, CloudWatch data, uh, uh, uh, uh. The new world is, "Here's the solution, here's the PR, or here's the insight." So it was a kind of epiphany for me of, like, we need to double down on that because this complex error message stack was for machines. I can make the case that we should have never given that to a user.

Jack Altman 29:40 Should have shown, like, a natural language error in some way?

Guillermo Rauch 29:43 Correct.

Jack Altman 29:43 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 29:44 Uh, and in fact, probably what this customer wanted was-- and I, I mean, this is kind of, like, maybe too hardcore for today, but here's the [chuckles] email I should write the CEO of that other company, like, "Go and complain to that vendor-

Jack Altman 29:58 Yeah

Guillermo Rauch 29:58 ... because it's not us." But by the way, I think this is gonna resonate strongly with a lot of people that build platforms and infrastructure. Fault attribution, correct, precise fault attribution, is one of the hardest problems in platforms. One thing that would always frustrate me about the internet was people would give a lot of shit to the Google Chrome team. They would say that it consumes too much memory, and that makes absolutely no sense because-... it's the web pages that consume the memory. How does that nuance not get lost to an end user? People just think they started meme-ifying it. Like, if you've ever seen this, uh, guy that eats a lot of things, it's Chrome eating all the available memory in your machine. And there's things that Google Chrome can do, like they can evict tabs more aggressively, which has its own set of downsides because it's like: "Oh, I shut down this app for you, huh, because I wanted to save memory." And there is, uh, of course, the amount of engineering that it takes to, like, do really good memory compression I don't even want to get into.

Jack Altman 30:53 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 30:54 But fault attribution, so what they ended up doing, I think they still have it, is that if you hover the tab, they say how much that website is consuming, and you should take it up to that [chuckles] website. And there's al- also this really interesting question of, like, I love a web that's extremely powerful. The vision of the web put forth by Apple is that the web should only render-- like, it should all look like Wikipedia. It's like, it's like a glorified e-book reader. I love the fact that the web is this insanely powerful platform. But when you give people more power, you get into this fault attribution problem, and the cloud has it in spades. Because your visitor only cares about the fact that if you go to, like, you know, hotwebsite.com, and they're gonna buy something, it works end to end. But if you have a lot of vendors in the pipeline, then how do I tell you, the developer, "Oh, it was this company that let you down. It was not Vercel." And so agents can solve this for us. And by the way, it seems like something small, and I'm, like, nitpicking over, like, this house of cards, but, like, just telling people concretely what went wrong, it can

Guillermo Rauch 31:56 make a huge difference.

Jack Altman 31:56 Hearing you talk about it, sometimes I'm just, like, amazed that the internet goes down as infrequently as it does. [laughing] When, when you think about, like, this whole, um-

Guillermo Rauch 32:04 It's a huge house of cards. Yeah.

Jack Altman 32:06 It, it seems like it. Is that what it really is? 'Cause that's what it seems like to me-

Guillermo Rauch 32:09 It is

Jack Altman 32:09 ... as a non-technical person.

Guillermo Rauch 32:10 It really is.

Jack Altman 32:10 But that's what it appears like. [chuckles]

Guillermo Rauch 32:11 It really is. So I'll give you an example from two days ago. Someone compromised a very popular JavaScript package in, in a, in a public registry. That package was a dependency of a dependency of a dependency of millions of things, and because someone managed to claim that account, hack that person, and then publish the package, for a short burst of time, a lot of people had to hard rotate into patching that vulnerability. This has happened many times. So we had Log4Shell. Log4Shell is one of the craziest vulnerabilities in the history of the internet. So the logging library used by almost every mainstream Java application had a remote code execution vulnerability, that all it required is for you to send someone a URL, and then if that URL happened to be logged, you would take over a remote machine. So imagine I send you a URL, someone vis... It, it might not even in- involve s- sending it to anybody. I go to the URL. Let's say I go to google.com/query=bad something, something nefarious, that gets logged by Log4j, and all of Google's servers are compromised by me by just one line of code.

Jack Altman 33:22 That seems insane.

Guillermo Rauch 33:23 That happened. That happened, and the whole security industry and infrastructure industry hard rotated into that for, like, an entire month. The cleanup of that might still not be done.

Jack Altman 33:33 Wow.

Guillermo Rauch 33:33 I think we sometimes ignore the adversarial AI game. It's one of the things that we're heavily investing into, is like, how do we get ahead of the fact that people can now misuse all of these LLMs? But a worse alignment problem is that if code gen, as you said, continues to grow at the rate that it's going, and our o- we continue to rely more and more and more on code gen, and code gen continues to get better and better and better and better, as a bad actor, all you have to do is say: "GPT-6, build me the best possible attack for google.com." Okay, if I'm a, an experienced security engineer, what do you do? Well, so first of all, what ve- very good security engineers do is they write their own tools. There's a lot of tools on GitHub for, like, scanners that you can use. Uh, and, for example, they know about known vulnerabilities. They will look for, like, an old version of Log4Shell and whatever. But actually, the best people in the industry write their own tools and keep them secret, and they get them better and better and better over time, and they make them very specialized. So you could see in a world where GPT-6 builds its own tool just to attack a given target.

Jack Altman 34:34 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 34:35 And so it's gonna be multi-industry or multi-company effort to, to combat this. I think you can do some things in, like, refusing prompts, but I think that's gonna give us diminishing returns because people very quickly realize they could say, [chuckles] you know, you could say: "Imagine that you're attacking google.com." And, and so there's diminishing returns on, like, modifying system prompts and, like, blocking things and prompt leaks everyone's given up on. And if you notice this, like, the v0 prompt is somewhere in, on GitHub, and people are, like, trying to, like, pr- provoke me and say, "Oh, did you realize that v0 prompt is on GitHub?" I was like: "There's no value to the prompt. Go at it." Like, the Grok prompt is there, the Claude Code prompt is there, the Gemini prompt is there. Protecting the prompt, diminishing returns.

Jack Altman 35:15 Mm.

Guillermo Rauch 35:16 Blocking, diminishing returns. So what you need to do is you need-- we need to make the world more secure faster than attackers will build, you know, cyber threats and scanners and, and, a- attacking tools and so on. So that's one of the things that feels very brittle about the

Guillermo Rauch 35:33 internet today.

Jack Altman 35:33 When you think about where code gen is right now, and you maybe analogi- analogize it to self-driving cars, which, you know, ten years ago, like, worked a little bit, you know, now they work pretty well, but, like, it took longer than everybody thought. How much time do you... is your sense that we have before people are prompting whole, like, you know, robust, commercial-grade web apps into existence?

Guillermo Rauch 35:56 A lot of people are excited today about building personal software, so this is very real. Like, people s-

Jack Altman 36:02 Like a to-do list or something.

Guillermo Rauch 36:03 People can now prompt the thing that they wanted personally.

Jack Altman 36:06 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 36:06 So, for example, the design team at Vercel has a bunch of tools that they built so that they can take an asset, post-process it, so that they can ship it in the way that they want it, and thus simplifying a process that could have taken, like, days, weeks, et cetera. There's now a very precise software tool that can do it. There's also the-- and this kind of dovetails into, like-... There's internal tools, dashboarding tools. One of the things that has been an emergent learning from using v0 is that we use the classic business intelligence tools a lot less. We used to have this, and it kind of seems crazy in retrospect, we used to have these, like, fixed dashboards that over time, no one opens. So of course, you have the top-line company metrics and that, like, you have your master dashboard that people, you know, you have to come back to. You're working on your board deck presentations, and you have an authoritative one dashboard maybe. But then all of these BI tools evolved to have this huge list of things that get unmaintained and people don't look at. Because in reality, what people want is generative UI.

Jack Altman 37:08 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 37:08 People want to have a question and to produce the perfect visualization for that question just in time, and that's something that agents have already taken over from any other category of software. Meaning, if you were to say, "Can you replicate, I don't know, name your favorite BI, like, uh, Microsoft Power BI? Can you replicate it with vibe coding?" I would say absolutely freaking not. If I have to create a platform that supports ten million enterprise-grade customers and whatever, it's very hard to compete one-on-one to the entire platform. But the way that they're gonna get defeated, potentially is more sneaky, is I don't- I no longer go to that big, bloated platform because I can just, in time, generate exactly what I needed. And so it's a different conception of software. It's not that it was replicating what existed, it's that I'm shifting the way that I build altogether.

Jack Altman 38:02 Yeah, it's not that somebody's gonna build a new company competing directly with that, it's that each of those customers will just make their own little thing.

Guillermo Rauch 38:09 Correct. And that's already happening.

Jack Altman 38:10 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 38:10 And that's-- And, and again, the, the rigor of that is even arguably higher. The quality of the visualizations, the component system that it fetches for rendering the data, like, all of that looks better, is faster.

Jack Altman 38:22 They can change it if they want to.

Guillermo Rauch 38:23 Correct.

Jack Altman 38:24 If they want some new features, they add it same day.

Guillermo Rauch 38:26 Yes. I had an anecdote, so I, I presented yesterday, so to give you an idea of how v0 is expanding, so a lot of it is PLG, just like Vercel. They just start using v0, et cetera. But this CTO at a company basically started vibe coding in his own personal account when he was talking to a customer. This is a CTO, not a PM, et cetera. A person that would have never written a UI, a front- frontend code in their life. And so what happened is, the, their customer was saying, "You know, if you don't give me this feature, we're basically gonna churn over time." Classic conversation [chuckles] that you get in with your customers. What he did is, during the conversation, he vibe coded: "Okay, let me understand exactly what you want." So he vibe coded a version of that feature. The guy in that same conversation, thirty-minute conversation, said, "That's exactly what I want." So this is the other emergent use case, is you basically built an end-to-end version of what the customer wanted, plugged into your data source, and now it can be, if necessary, it can be merged into the mainline platform. So what the, what the guy told me, and this is what he had me present v0 to the rest of their entire field, field CD organization, is: "I want everyone to w- build this way. I want our data to be exposed into this vibe coding platform, so we're not left behind." And the, the announcement was, "This feature is going live in Q4." But now, this is important, right? He did vibe code it in thirty minutes, but to be merged into the mainline monster is not so easy. You don't just vibe code, you know, the r- the production system and whatever, and this is why I was arguing that to merge things into monsters, monster code bases, things with, like, millions of customers, et cetera, you need a slightly different tools, slightly different techniques, and I think that's why the world will continue to partition further into, like, these highly specialized tools for each kind of problem.

Jack Altman 40:16 Yep.

Guillermo Rauch 40:17 Agents, basically.

Jack Altman 40:18 What do you think a, a kid who wants to create software in the future should be doing right now? Because in the past, it was more clear, like, learn to program and-

Guillermo Rauch 40:27 Right.

Jack Altman 40:28 -you know. Now, let's say you're sixteen or thirteen or ten and, you know, you're starting to wanna think about these kinds of products. What would you spend your time on now?

Guillermo Rauch 40:37 The best advice I've ever gotten on how to improve my software engineering was, have a product idea in mind. If I tell you, "Go and master programming like it's topology and math," it's weird. Like, it's... Where do you focus your efforts on? What language do you learn? It's like everything is a problem and nothing is a problem. And so what I would say is, if you start with something like v0, you're starting to build that muscle of: What do I really want? What do I want to build? What am I visualizing in my head? And I do know that this is kind of a somewhat controversial topic because there's a whole line of thinking in psychology that some people can visualize and some people... Have you heard about this?

Jack Altman 41:21 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 41:21 The visualization power of people is like, uh, the different kinds of eyes in Naruto. Like, the amount that you can picture in your head varies by person.

Jack Altman 41:29 Yep.

Guillermo Rauch 41:30 But I do think that we have to exercise that, that muscle. It very well might be that what we call taste is actually that ability to refine that idea that you loosely have in your head and refine it, and refine it, and refine it, and visualize that next state. It's like, instead of next token prediction, it's like next refinement prediction that you're doing in your head of like, "This is what it needs to look like-

Jack Altman 41:55 That's interesting

Guillermo Rauch 41:55 -for people to absorb it positively."

Jack Altman 41:57 That was something I was gonna ask you about, was because, um, you know, taste became a buzzword, and, you know, I think it can, it can have meaning, but it can also be kind of meaningless. But it feels like there's something there, and that- that's actually a pretty good- it's, like, the best, uh, attempt at a working definition I've heard, that it's your ability to sort of, like, visualize a future. And you can actually see how that would explain some people's ability to see a trend early or to see a talented person when they meet one, or those kinds of things.

Guillermo Rauch 42:22 I also think it's people focusing on that end of the rainbow that we talked about. Like-... how much are you, are you getting distracted by the side quest that went into building the thing? Versus, okay, what is it gonna do when it lands? What does it look like? And I think this is why we created Vercel, is that we thought, you know, the world has to change its focus a little bit. The cloud has been all about, like, that low level, like, it's like material science. And yeah, materials are extremely important, and I think Vercel can do a good job at curating some of those for you so that you can actually put your focus on the sky. Like, what is that next thing that you're gonna give the world? And this, by the way, applies to everything. It applies to, like, how you talk about your thing, the words on the screen, the way- what you attach to your tweet when you get that thing out, how the- what the blog post that announces your product looks like. And I do, I, I do want to build a world where people are, are, are, are looking at that. And, um, it was really interesting, by the way, so a couple weekends ago, uh, I had my... You said thirteen-year-old. I said to my, uh, six-year-old, he walked into my office and he said, "What do you do? Like, what are you doing?" I said- 'cause I- at that very time, I was vibe coding. I was like: "Well, I'm creating software. I'm creating something." And then we got into this conversation, like, could he create a game? And I said, "Well, what game idea do you have?" And he said, "A soccer game." And so we built a soccer game. I'm gonna share it on Next because it's dope. But the hardest thing for, uh, in that process of a back and forth with him was he had the idea of the soccer game. That was legitimately his own idea. It was really hard to get him to ask me what the next thing, what the refinement of his idea would be, and that didn't come naturally. So w- in the end, what we ended up building is a game where you dribble the ball, and we count, and we make it harder as it goes, and it looks really pretty. The pretty part probably came from me as a my- over something. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 44:13 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 44:14 My lesson there was that, again, you have to build this muscle of understanding there's an audience out there, there's something that technology is capable of, and there's an interest. He's, he's interested in, like, focusing on soccer. And how do you bring all those things together into prompts, into asking the machine what you want to see in the world? I almost think this is the new... because we, quote, unquote, provocatively have "solved" code generation. 'Cause keep in mind, you can go in v0, and you can also ask it to build this data visualization that prevented the churn of a customer for a, for a security company. And so because the platforms can now do all of these things, it boils down to ideas, it boils down to capital allocation. Tokens have a cost.

Jack Altman 44:59 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 44:59 So if anything is possible, you know, may the best idea win, and it'll get enough tokens behind it that it can a- that we can keep developing it, right? And so I think that's gonna be the skill of the future. I, I hope my kids learn it. I hope my kids are able to, like, do that idea translation really quickly and, and that mapping.

Jack Altman 45:17 Does someone still need to understand the lower levels of the code underneath it all?

Guillermo Rauch 45:21 You know, we didn't get into that at all, and, and we could build a pretty banger game, and we could keep going, going, going, and I don't think we would ever look-- a- again, as the, as the world becomes more agentic-

Jack Altman 45:31 But, like, fifty years from now, you know, when all the people who know the deeper levels of code today are no longer in the game, could we have a world where you have a billion people who only know how to vibe code, but nobody knows the stuff underneath?

Guillermo Rauch 45:43 Well, I mean, we're kind of in that world already, right? Like, a, a lot of people have no clue how their garbage collector of their programming language works. I mean, a lot of people are pouring effort into interpretability of LLMs because we do not know how they arrive to the answers they do.

Jack Altman 45:59 Right.

Guillermo Rauch 46:00 We will need frameworks. We will need guardrails. We would need ways to interpret and define the semantics. I do think it w- always boils down not to how the instructions in the processor get written out and executed; it boils down to that relationship between investment. You know, how much are you willing to pay for a certain level of performance, for example, and outcomes? Like, what do you want out of this system?

Jack Altman 46:31 It's just a crazy thought that there's just layers of abstraction, and in the future, people just won't need to know the, like, ancient layers, but they'll- they'll be driving it all, but nobody needs to know it.

Guillermo Rauch 46:42 The world may just be driven by economics, you know, energy allocation. You know, this, a- there might be a world in which we've perfectly solved this transmutation of energy source to intelligence, because if this is scaling, loss of test time, compute, et cetera, continue, then we pour more effort into the task, and we get the outcome that we wanted. Now, the question will be, not everyone will have the same token budget as everybody else. So it really boils down to, like, who crafts the most compelling vision of the future? And the storytelling-- by the way, this is a human- this is where Herm might have just nailed it. The storytelling is how you persuade the world that your idea is the one that is worth allocating tokens into. Maybe there's a world where, like, your seed round just gets dumped a hundred percent into tokens.

Jack Altman 47:28 Uh-huh.

Guillermo Rauch 47:28 And all you're doing is, like, going around the world, it's like: "I have this vision of the future. Here's a quick vibe code that I did in v0, but if you really wanted to see it at, like, planet scale, we have to pour a lot more tokens into this thing." And that's how you get to, like, the one-person billion company and, and so on.

Jack Altman 47:42 At the beginning of the conversation, you used a term I really liked, like chasing a dragon, and I think there's, like, a- there's an interesting debate among founders, where some founders believe that you should just have a super clear vision and will it into existence, like creating a movie. There are some founders who are much more iterative and talk to customers and see what it is, and there's pivots, and you get there that way. What I observe about you is that you talk a ton to your users. You seem extremely flexible of mind, but then you also use this term, chasing a dragon.

Guillermo Rauch 48:10 Yeah, yeah. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 48:11 And so it seems like you've got both of those somehow.

Guillermo Rauch 48:13 It's one of the hardest things to do.

Jack Altman 48:14 Is that how you think about-

Guillermo Rauch 48:15 Absolutely

Jack Altman 48:15 ... even now, as you think about a new product or evolving, is it this combination of chase a dragon and then listen to get-

Guillermo Rauch 48:22 Hundred percent

Jack Altman 48:23 - your way there?

Guillermo Rauch 48:23 Hundred per- and this is the magic of how you build a PLG and enterprise business. The enterprise way of building product has to be extreme. That conversation that I just talked about is like-... What do you need? What is your a- concrete pain points with this technology? And, like, let's build it together, and let's evolve it. But it has to be mixed with the vision of the future, 'cause otherwise, you're not gonna see the next platform shift. You're not gonna see the next-- what the next generation of coders and builders are excited about. So you have to have that first principle thinking that I sometimes call it internally, work backwards from science fiction, with a healthy dose of, like: Well, we're also supporting some of the largest dot coms on the planet, and we have to build things that are very concrete, that are problems today, in this-- in the current world today, right? That is the magic of-- That's something that can bring success to a lot of people. Now, I'll make the counter case of that. Agents can do their own research. So as v0 becomes more agentic, one of the things that it can do is search the web. So it used to be that humans would say: "Okay, my boss is asking me to create this really cool animation that does this and that." And so you start-- Sometimes you know a lot of things, and that's why we hire experts, but you also go on, go off and do research. And so now think about how agents are just LLM calls in a loop. So an agent is just something that's calling ChatGPT repeatedly, in quote, quote, quote-unquote. Now, think about deep research. Definitely, to me, one of the killer apps of AI in recent times, you can... The, the AI can go off and search three hundred different websites and read them for you, and then digest them. That'll be wielded by the programming agent, and so in that world, the programming agent can do the user research. And so if you said: "Okay, I want to build a soccer game." Okay, go off and do research about what are users saying in your community forums? What are people saying on X? I can have the PM agent, essentially, as part of this multi-agent architecture. And, and by the way, a lot of what I do is talk to users. So I talk to users and say: "Okay, like, search for my keyword," and, you know, "Okay, there's these ten complaints. Let's stack rank them." There's also research with, like, Salesforce is saying about, like, pipeline and opportunities, et cetera. So I do think the world will become more and more agentic, but I don't believe that there's going to be one agent to rule them all.

Guillermo Rauch 50:46 This is the promise of what I call the next internet, the transition from HTTP to MCP. If MCP allows us to deploy agents that are highly specialized, then the world becomes a collaboration between agents, as opposed to one agent to rule them all. And that is true to my taste for what the web and the internet should be like. I always loved the web because I rejected the idea there's gonna be a platform keeper that decides what gets on their platform and what gets off their platform and controls everything. This is the example of, like, people literally were just regurgitating what happened when Elon bought X, and then Apple wanted to take X off the App Store.

Jack Altman 51:28 Hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 51:28 And so we cannot allow that. We cannot allow a world where, like, people can arbitrarily take you off the internet, right? And so I want a world where MCP wins, because that would mean that there's all kinds of agent choices. There's al-- The companies can rethink themselves as, instead of just having a frontend of pixels, I have a frontend of tools and a frontend to my data, and MCP is emerging as the new frontend instead of for humans, for agents.

Jack Altman 51:58 Particularly when I was, you know, running Lattice, but i- just in general now, one, one of the things I most look up to in companies is extreme coherence, when the product, and the customers, and the culture, and the employees all sort of-

Guillermo Rauch 52:12 Fit

Jack Altman 52:12 ... make sense together. Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 52:13 Yeah. [chuckles]

Jack Altman 52:13 Like, Apple is always like an example to me, where I'm just like: It's so different. You know, it's secretive. It's got all these different things about it, but it all makes sense together. It seems to me like you, with an open-source background, with the sort of way you're thinking about the future, being sort of developer-focused, it seems like there would be a culture and a type of person and, you know, the way you run the company that must match that.

Guillermo Rauch 52:36 Yeah, great question.

Jack Altman 52:37 Does that just emerge naturally, or is there a way-- Like, how do you think about making that all?

Guillermo Rauch 52:42 It emerges naturally, but you have to pay attention because sometimes you just take it for granted. I encourage everyone who runs a business to think about this. Like, I call it reverse engineering your success. Do you know that you can be successful and not fully understand why? I think people don't talk about this enough.

Jack Altman 52:55 All the time.

Guillermo Rauch 52:56 Like-

Jack Altman 52:56 I think many of the most successful people are like that. [chuckles]

Guillermo Rauch 52:58 [chuckles] And, and like: "Oh, it's because they did A, B, and C."

Jack Altman 53:01 You might have succeeded in spite of A, B, and C in some cases.

Guillermo Rauch 53:03 Yeah.

Jack Altman 53:03 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 53:03 And so re- reverse engineering your success is actually something I devote a lot. It's, like, there is a, there is a quote about, like: "It's harder to predict the past than predict than the future."

Jack Altman 53:12 Hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 53:12 Predicting the past means-

Jack Altman 53:13 It's a great quote

Guillermo Rauch 53:13 ... to actually understand-- Actually, it came from one of the creators of, uh, quantum physics.

Jack Altman 53:17 It's really good.

Guillermo Rauch 53:18 Um, reversing the past means that you understood the sequence of tokens or, like, reasoning traces that led you to where you are, and you leave out all the noise. And I think for us, that actually, the culture that we built of openness and transparency... I tweeted the other day that I love working behind the scenes to help our engineers present their own work. Meaning I help them: "Hey, like, I learned these things from X," or, like, "If you say this, maybe you're just being too verbose," and, like, "Uh, it would look better if you give this example," and whatever, so that I coach them on how I think about presenting my work, but I want them to own that storytelling. I want them to l- learn the: Oh, this is how I talk to customers. This is how I engage with the community. This is how I receive feedback. As opposed to the traditional thing, which is, like, you're sheltered and shielded by layers and layers and layers of obfuscation, and you, you don't get, as an engineer, the direct signal. But now, to your question, is-- I mean, this is amazing, at least to me: Was that something natural? It was emergent, but now it got-- it had, it had to get reified into our culture. We need to say that's who we are, and that's what we believe in, and that's behind our success. But it didn't... That understanding of, oh, there's the, all these little things that made you successful because some of them are, are second-order effects, like you said. What I always loved was open source.... Well, it turns out that if you love open source, it leads to this open contribution culture. It leads to a higher level of transparency. I got feedback from one of our colleagues that comparing- there's this idea of compare Slack workspaces. How was the Slack that you joined [chuckles] different from the Slack of the company you just left? It's a very important exercise for- - to do.

Jack Altman 55:03 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 55:03 And he was saying: "Well, the, the Slack at Vercel is just pure information. There's no direct message, thread, group, what- - it's just so much information." People learned how to digest what they were working on, and i- in a way, it almost feels like an internal Twitter. And of course, companies need a separate-- healthy separation between internal and external. And at Vercel, because we're r- responsible for so many critical workloads, privacy and compliance are extremely top of mind for us. But there i- there is a vibe of like, it's like an internal Twitter in the sense of like insight, insight, summary of something that I just learned by working with a customer, screenshot. And that is an immersion culture that then you have to say, "That's working for us. That's who we are. Let's keep doing it," so that when people join, it's not by accident.

Guillermo Rauch 55:50 That's how we work.

Jack Altman 55:51 One of the things that strikes me about you is not only are you running a big company, you're also deep in the technology, which is amazing to be able to both run the org and know all the technology. I thought, I have a lot of kids, and they take a lot of time.

Guillermo Rauch 56:02 [chuckles]

Jack Altman 56:02 You really, you really have a lot of kids. I know you're a runner. I'm not, like, trying to ask, like, what's your secret? But, like, how do you make it all work? Like, how do you f- str-- Is there anything that you've picked up over the years through parenthood, through building a company, as time pressure has gotten heavy on you? Is there anything that you've picked up or adapted that you think is broadly useful?

Guillermo Rauch 56:22 Yeah, I think there's actually a tweet by your brother Sam that I always loved, which was: You know, it doesn't matter what ladder of success you've achieved, working out is still hard for everybody day in and day... I do not want to go to the gym. Confronting that thing that I do not want to do every single day, this is why I don't care about what type of exercise, what's hot, CrossFit. I think that's something that's been different about me, is like, I've never followed any fitness trend.

Jack Altman 56:49 Hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 56:49 I'm so anti-fitness trend.

Jack Altman 56:51 Hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 56:52 I have done things that were falling off the po- popularity cliff. I boxed for many years. I would go every, every day to the gym from six AM to seven thirty AM to a boxing gym in the Dogpatch, that, like, the, the owner would tell me, like: "I don't know why, like, classic Western boxing is not as exciting anymore to people." Because I think it's because MMA, MMA has been growing and whatever. I love classical boxing. And same with I l- love calisthenics, and so I, I, I do things that are, like, off pattern.

Jack Altman 57:19 Mm-hmm.

Guillermo Rauch 57:20 But it doesn't matter what you do, because what you're doing is that confrontation of the thing that you didn't want to do, that hardens your mind, stabilizes your mental health, teaches discipline to my kids. My kids love walking into my office. I'm in the Peloton, and they're like: "Holy shit, why are you doing this?" They ask, they ask me why a lot. Like, "Why are you doing this?" And I explain that I- they're not gonna get it for a long time, but they need to learn, and I think everyone needs to learn that, like, there's something about our own individual personal development that has to do with that confrontation of things that are hard. And that's why I was giving the caveat to, like, make sure that whatever relationship you have with that coding agent is one that challenges you, and you're learning, and you're better for it at the end, right? It is, is, is expanding. It's- it gives you more capabilities. It's... You're taking something away from it, or just becoming the WALL-E guy. So my recommendation is, like, avoid the WALL-E future [chuckles] of, like, you're just like a blob floating in the sky, and work hard. And so there's, there's no

Guillermo Rauch 58:14 more secret to that.

Jack Altman 58:15 The last question I wanted to ask you, back to the taste question, and sort of, you know, you described it as this ability to sort of visualize something that hasn't come true yet, and how it might iterate and sort of see the path there. Is that something that can be learned or improved upon? And if so, how do you do it?

Guillermo Rauch 58:34 You know, uh, l- it links to this idea. I also do a lot of fitness for the meditation benefits. Like, I remember someone, I don't know who told me this, but they're like: "Look, there's passive meditation, there's active meditation." Passive is you're at the bottom of the tree, and you're like, i- like, you say your dharmas and whatever, and you go into the nothingness. I see my, you know, really hard workout this morning for thirty minutes of high-intensity interval training as a meditation of sorts. Meditation confers a particular attribute, which is presence. Presence gives you clarity of mind and allows you to capture nuances, reactions, little things about the world. You're just more tuned in. And I do think that one way that you can improve your taste and your product-building skills is being more attune to the actual reaction from people. Because you might say, like, "Here's my thing," and people say, "Awesome!" It's like, is that an awesome of, like, true joy? Can you be present in a way that reads the world more precisely?

Jack Altman 59:29 Very hard to have high taste if your brain's off thinking about the next email or the next meeting you gotta go to-

Guillermo Rauch 59:34 Yeah

Jack Altman 59:34 - or whatever.

Guillermo Rauch 59:35 All of those things, focus, presence, self-honesty. And I think this also comes from that place of confidence and, like, that medi- almost, like, meditative state of, like, can you actually confront the negative reaction, or are you running away from it? Because the best thing you could do for your product is to read all of the negative feedback about it. Can you do it?

Jack Altman 59:55 [chuckles]

Guillermo Rauch 59:55 It's like, it's almost like running on a treadmill and be like, "Oh, shit," like-

Jack Altman 59:58 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 59:58 ... My boxing trainer would do this cruel thing. So this is in the Dogpatch, for those that don't know, not too far away, maybe like a couple miles away from the... or a mile away from, um, the Giants Stadium, the baseball stadium. And we would work out for an hour and twenty-nine minutes, and then on the last minute, he would say, "Lap to the Giants Stadium and back."

Jack Altman 1:00:18 Uh-huh.

Guillermo Rauch 1:00:18 And I was like: "You just pushed us to a world of pain that is unbelievable, and then you threw another crazy thing on top?" And so that was the process of, like, there's just always more than you can do. And I, I do think that there's a level of tolerance of pain that we can always work on and, and get to greater and greater heights. And you can link this to product building, that you have to face and seek that negative feedback from the world. And by the way, a lot of people want to help you. This is actually the nice thing about it. Like, so many people want to help you and, and want you to build the right thing. And, and you called this out when, when we talked about enterprises. People really want- they're invested in your success.

Jack Altman 1:00:55 Yeah.

Guillermo Rauch 1:00:56 Just don't get in, in the way of your own success.

Jack Altman 1:00:58 Yeah. It's a great place to end it. Guillermo, thanks a ton for your time today. This was great.

Guillermo Rauch 1:01:01 Thank you. [upbeat music]