Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on AI-Powered Coding, Software 2.0, and the AI Open Source Question

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Guillermo Rauch** (0:46)
My own personal website, I painstakingly crafted every pixel for, and I've been doing front-end engineering for 20 freaking years.
Not only was I able to reproduce my entire front-end, my entire app with just natural language prompts, but where I was really shocked was when I pressed view code. And what I found was better code than what I wrote. And for example, one of the areas where it was objectively better was it was more accessible. The AI produced not just the icon, but it produced the label Twitter. And the label Twitter was only being displayed for screen readers, meaning for people that need assistive devices to navigate the Internet.
And that had slipped my mind. It's little details like that, that AIs will just, you know, they have infinite memory, like Marc Andreessen says, infinite patience, they have access to infinite data, and they keep getting more and more and more. So it's going to be hard to compete with that.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:48)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.
Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Thornburg.
And my guest is Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, the front-end cloud that enables developers to build and publish wonderful things. Guillermo is by any standard a world-class software developer, who now, like so many other founders, has recognized the transformative power of AI and begun to pivot his company around it. For Vercel, so far, this means releasing both open-source template projects that embody the best practices for developing LLM-powered token streaming applications, and also developing their own unique Pro tool, v0.dev, which allows developers to prompt for and iterate on interactive UIs directly in the browser. But of course, these are just the beginning. In this conversation, we discuss coding assistance as LLM's breakthrough use case, the critical importance of developing the skill of using AI tools effectively, the future of software development by human AI hybrid teams, why and how AI will be incorporated into essentially all software products, which types of AI experiences make sense as GPTs and which are better with standalone UIs, the business strategy that informs AI product strategy, the importance of staying up to date on AI developments and constantly questioning one's assumptions, and why Guillermo believes that open source approaches will ultimately win out in the end. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and we always love to see people sharing the show with their friends. Now, I hope you enjoy this conversation about the future of AI and software development with Guillermo Rauch of Vercel. Guillermo Rauch of Vercel, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Guillermo Rauch** (4:05)
Great to be here, Nathan. Good to see you.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:07)
Yeah, great to see you too. It's funny, we have known each other mostly from a distance for a long time. I've been following your career as a software developer since you were, I think, 19 years old and kind of a technology prodigy working in Buenos Aires. I don't know if it was your first project, but the first one that I came across was the MooTools library, which I used to build a couple web applications back in the day. And since then, you've gone on to found this company, Vercel, where you're the CEO, and you really have built a remarkable reputation for just super high quality work throughout the software industry. So I kind of want to just spend a little bit of time setting the stage.
I think people, obviously, listen to the show, are very interested in AI. They may or may not have a lot of context on the business that you've built.
So maybe just for starters, kind of run me through a few of the themes of your career, JavaScript, TypeScript, performance, deployments, all these kind of great themes, and tell us about the business, and then we'll get into the AI that's coming online now.