⚡ Inside GitHub’s AI Revolution: Jared Palmer Reveals Agent HQ & The Future of Coding Agents

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
Alright, we are here for a very special edition of Latent Space with my buddy, Jared Palmer, SVP at GitHub and VP at Core AI at Microsoft.

**Jared Palmer** (0:13)
Correct. Dual title.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
Yeah. Twice the fun. Dude, we're to have two jobs?

**Jared Palmer** (0:17)
I'm only on, I'm only, to full disclaimer, I'm only on day 13, I think.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
Yeah.

**Jared Palmer** (0:22)
So early days, so, so far so good.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:25)
So far so good. We've been trying to get you on the podcast for two years, I think.

**Jared Palmer** (0:28)
I think so, yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
You, yeah, you're a busy guy.

**Jared Palmer** (0:32)
We're doing it in person, so.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:33)
We have to do it in person. Yeah, exactly. It's way better. I should also plug that you have, if Jared Palmer fans should dig into your previous podcasts with Ken Ruler. Don't let that. It's for the interview. Okay. So, but-

**Jared Palmer** (0:47)
Shout out to Ken.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:48)
Shout out to Ken. Before that, you were building, I guess, like vZero and AISDK, and you were just sort of VP of AI at-

**Jared Palmer** (0:56)
At Vercel, yes. All AI initiatives and vibes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:59)
Yeah. And I feel like basically you went from, like you sort of building one coding agent to now being the home for all coding agents. Is that like the general vibe of Agent HQ?

**Jared Palmer** (1:08)
I think that's right.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:09)
Yeah.

**Jared Palmer** (1:09)
So, backing up, I spent the last sort of two years or so building vZero, at Vercel and AISDK. And then the summer took time off, and now joined GitHub. And today, we launched Agent HQ, among other things, here at Universe. And yeah, it's going to be the home, we hope, of not only agents, but also developers. And this seems like the gravity well of this new collaboration space that we're trying to build.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:36)
Yeah. What do you think, basically, that GitHub can do that you couldn't do at vZero?

**Jared Palmer** (1:42)
GitHub is an enormous platform, right? So these are-

**SPEAKER_1** (1:44)
Under $880 million. It's something about for-

**Jared Palmer** (1:45)
Yeah, it's under $8 million developers. It's just the scale is immense, right? And vZero was focused on not only one language, but one framework, right? And a specific problem space with a built-in renderer. And for those who are not aware of vZero, it's like a fault or lovable, but it's built by Vercel. And it's focused on building Next.js apps, specifically Next.js apps. That constraint was rather liberating for the team at the time, and it lets us really like laser focus. It does.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:16)
That's a world at it.

**Jared Palmer** (2:18)
I hope, thank you. I hope so. And obviously at GitHub, we're the home of all languages and frameworks and developers. And so the scope is broadened. And yeah, it's just a different part of the map, if you will.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:33)
Yeah. So you've been basically covering the entire journey of coding agents from the start. What do you think, what's your personal journey through coding agents, right? Like we started out with Copilot, obviously GitHub started the Copilot trend. Sure, sure. When, tell us about the origin story of V0.

**Jared Palmer** (2:51)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:52)
And then how that develops and maybe where, like what you want to see next with the history.

**Jared Palmer** (2:58)
It's funny you ask that. As I've told this story multiple times, I feel like I've unlocked different parts of it in my brain by going back, you know, like so maybe we'll have to figure out how retrieval never works.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:09)
By the way, interesting how memory works for agents.

**Jared Palmer** (3:11)
Totally. That's why I brought it up. This is kind of a thing as you, yeah, sometimes you discover new paths, right?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:15)
Yeah.

**Jared Palmer** (3:15)
Anyway, the story goes like this. So when ChatGPT first came out, honestly it was incredible, right? Like world-changing, immediately faster-growing product ever. I looked back at the timeline and dates and we were very early when I was at Vercel jumping into AI stuff. But the journey kind of went like this. So at the time, actually there was no AI division, there was no AI group. I was actually the Director of Engineering for all of Vercel frameworks and I was helping Next.js, Svelte, Turbo repo, Turbo pack, Webpack and all internal DevTools at Vercel. I was helping the Next.js team dog food and test the initial implementation of server actions. Instead of building a to-do app, Gagermo, the CEO of Vercel was like, I want you to build a playground. I was like, okay, cool. So that led to the AI Playground, which is now just part of AISDK. We'll get there in a second.