Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js)

0:00 One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, V Zero is like a super genius five year old PhD with ADHD. I'm not gonna oversell this as like it knows everything about everything, but it has this sparks of Brilliant. How do you think things are gonna change for product managers, for product teams? People could be more full stacked. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about. Making possible invisible surfaces. A lot of people are wondering what happens to engineer should I learn how to code? A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is gonna be very important for you because you're gonna be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better. We hear this word taste all the time. In terms of building taste, people are always like, How the hell do I do that? Taste sometimes I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that Oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that it can develop.

1:07 I think is extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. And you'll develop that muscle. Where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen? We need to Stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software. Today, my guest is Guillermo Rausch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, which amongst other things makes a product called V Zero. which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world like Next.js and Socket IO.

1:58 He's both a builder and is building a product that's gonna change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you want to really understand how product development is gonna change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear, notion, superhuman, perplexity pro, and granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rausch. This episode is brought to you by Work OS.

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4:40 That's V A N T A dot com slash Lenny. Yeah. Guillermo, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time

4:53 I guess participating in the podcast and uh love being here. Oh, I appreciate that. Okay. So I know you saw this. I did the survey recently where I asked my readers, what tools do you use most in your day to day work as a product? builder as a product manager. And in the category of Engineering tools.

5:08 Uh V zero Came in right below cursor. And GitHub. for people's most used AI. Building tools.

5:16 So Clearly people love what you're doing. Yeah, we're very happy to see that and for us We're at the very beginning of the journey in some ways because V Zero is a relatively new tool. But Vercelle, you know, our company has been around for a while, you know.

5:29 The way that I explain to people is Anytime you're using the internet. if there's a website or web application that's really fast, innovative, hopefully it's running on our platform. Uh, we're out there, we're running a lot of websites at scale. If you watch the Super Bowl recently

5:44 Three different companies were promoting digital products. that were built and delivered on Vercelle. So not only can you deploy your ideas and build them on Verse. they can scale to huge volumes of traffic and huge audiences. So A lot of people know us because of a framework called NextJS.

6:03 It's an open source framework. uh based on the React technology open source by Meta. And it powered some of the most innovative products on the internet. So when you use Claude. Work rock.

6:15 Or Mid journey. You're using NextJS. You're using for sales technologies. So with V zero what we're trying to do is and you it's funny'cause you put you put us in the rightfully, I think, in the building or development category in that survey.

6:29 But what we're trying to do with V zero is Help more people participate in building software. Increase the sort of the total addressable market of people that are actually shipping things, shipping real products. And at the same time Just like you would with Chad G T.

6:47 We want visitor to be just extremely, extremely easy. And the outputs that it it generates make them as refined and realistic as possible. Like The things that you create with V zero hopefully live up to that standard set by You know, some of the best and largest websites on the internet. Uh I was gonna ask you how V Zero came out of Verse and I

7:06 I I my theory was it was like you guys are sitting around being like how do we get more people building websites? And it's like Okay, let's just help them do it really easily. Is that it's like TAM expansion for Versea. Is that in some ways it's it's what uh I've been doing for not only ten years that I've been Uh almost working on Verse. But maybe my entire life because

7:27 My strength as a developer is kinda meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So NextJS is one, but before that, in a previous life, I created another tool called Socket I.O. which is a real time communication mechanism that powers For example, every time you use Notion I think you interviewed

7:49 Ivan. Uh when Notion is to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators. They use a real time engine. That I build for socket IO. So

8:00 The reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past Something that was very Difficult to do. But very compelling, like it was with real time in the past.

8:12 Like it's building cutting edge applications on the web with next. And I try to make it as easy as possible. But you still needed to know development skills, right? For us and the opportunity was If there is maybe Five million

8:27 React developers. Which is the sort of the library engine that we use. And there is maybe twenty million JavaScript developers. How many product builders or people with aspirations of building products exist? My

8:40 Back of the napkin, like minimum. Calculation is a hundred million. Yeah, I'll tell you it's funny where I get that number from. Slack. has about

8:51 a hundred million monthly active users. And what you do on Slack is you go in it and you talk to people And a lot of those people are building digital products, right? And they talk to one another about what they would want to see in the world. They talk to customers through s shared channels. I love that feature.

9:08 We talk to a lot of the Verse customers and like they tell us like I want to build this, I wanna see that, I want this feature, I want that thing. And so the opportunity with V zero was It's not that you're gonna stop But what if you could yap into the computer? And

9:21 See something happen. Build a prototype. Build your first version of a product. Build a demo. Build a full stack product. Building a ship it.

9:30 And so the the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of her cell. But concretely the genesis story was when Chad GPT came out We noticed that it was very good. at writing the code.

9:44 that are tools used. So Chad GBT right of right out of the bat. Was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind. Which is a CSS styling technology. was good at Next JS.

9:56 And again, the power of open source. our tools are already in the training data of the internet. And so that long term bet and vision and open source really paid off. And so because the models were so good at writing this kind of code. The idea for V Zero came naturally from what if we could build a chat GPT for building web products. Speaking of that, I I I didn't actually know, so I had Boltz C on the podcast and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked

10:20 what they are doing. And you guys do you guys sit on ChatGPT and open AI stuff? We started out on open AI and we've always used a combination of models. It's funny, right now on Twitter there's A million there's thread with a million views of people trying to reverse engineer the prompt and the models that we're and they're all finding that there's all this kind of different models that are specialists In different tasks. And there's a pipeline of models where a model could hand off

10:45 Work to another model. And so open AI, Gemini Claude. But we predate anthropic because I'll give credit to Chad G BT that You know

10:56 the the utility of it was so general purpose. But From the very first release it was very good. In fact, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, we uh uh the first prototype of V Zero might have even predated Chad GPD or At the very least, I think we were running on GPT three point five. So we've always had this vision of unlocking

11:15 uh more power for the web through through LLMs and and there's a lot of very interesting technical details of why, by the way. LM's happen to be so good. at the task of web design and and web development, uh that we could get into, but um it was like the perfect time timing for us. That's uh I wanna come back to that. That's actually a really good question. But let me ask a couple other questions here. In terms of V Zero, what's the scale at this point? We hear all these numbers about all the folks in the space.

11:43 What can you share about what's happening with V Zero? Uh I can share that it's growing exponentially and that over one point three million users Have interacted with V zero so far. We had our largest day ever yesterday and today again. We're the largest we're one of the largest customers of

12:01 Most of clo providers at this point. Uh, we're hitting the limits of every GBU L infrastructure out there on the planet. And What the m the most exciting thing for me is what I'm seeing people built with V zero. So we launch a feature

12:17 About a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called V Zero Community. It already has twenty thousand submissions. If I I'm sure people in your audience have used Figma. One of the things that I love at Figma is Figma files.

12:31 That I can go And grab a starting point for a for something. Could be a logo. Could be A menu.

12:39 And you can start with something that someone has already contributed, kinda like that spirit of open source. And so in less than a month I think we've done over twenty thousand community submissions. Uh so We've learned so much about building AI products with this, and we continue to sort of open source and share our best practices. But one of the things that I've definitely learned is Prompting it.

13:00 Seems like the easiest interface in the world because It's just And input. Right, and you put text in it. But there's a little bit of a writer's block sometimes. So

13:11 One of my favorite things that I've seen and even looking at the homepage right now and you can see like that random assortment of community submissions. And uh they have a twelve hundred forks and fifteen hundred forks and six thousand forks. And this is every time people saying like oh instead of starting from scratch I'll start from this application that someone else has built.

13:31 And it prompted To modify it and make it my own. So these the community submissions are people building apps on V0 and sharing What they build where you can look at the code and fork it. And it's becoming like a compounding investment, right? Like people

13:44 share something, someone else grabs it, makes it better. Maybe you used it at that point. In many ways I see this as the next evolution of GitHub. Whereas GitHub was So

13:56 It was a Marvel. for for software development because It I don't know if you remember this, but like the initial l little tagline underneath the GitHub logo was social coding.

14:08 And it had this democratization effect of building software. But s you still needed to know how to code. And so what we're after is social product building in many ways, right? Like everybody should be able to cook.

14:22 And share what they're what they're building. I I love how I I hadn't thought of it this way, but I love that it connects so much to your open source roots. Where people are building on V zero and then sharing what they're building and then people can build off those things. It's kind of like an open source AI building experience. It's fascinating, right? Like in many ways if you think about the git commit. The get commit is super interesting. If you if you if you watch how an engineer works, they

14:45 Look at a problem. They spend a lot of time in their code editor. And at the end they say, I think I I got it. I think I I I think I've fixed it. And then they produce a get commit.

14:56 They summarized Their intent And what they try to do after they've done the work. D zero

15:05 Inverts that's The gid commit. Is you go into the chat and say Please change the

15:14 And when I click it Save this form to a database. And so you're starting with the intent. And the output is the code.

15:26 And it's a side effect we can also produce a good commit for you. That feature's not online yet, but it's coming in the next couple of days. Spoiler alert for the group. And so I like this idea of we can create a super set. Of all software building.

15:40 With this platform. And that is true to my initial intention with Vercell. Our mission is to enable the world to build and ship the best products. And so Enabling that for the largest possible group of people is very exciting to me.

15:54 So let's go to this question of just uh kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of people. Seeing these things happening, product builders that have You know, that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. With apps like this. coming around where you could just type a thing in and build it for you and it's beautiful.

16:11 How do you think things are gonna change for Product managers for product teams, where do you think where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen? How do you think product will be built in the next few years? The most profound one That I kind of alluded to. is that conversations between product builders and their customers

16:29 Will be Mediated By This V zero links.

16:35 This artifacts. I think when Claude came up with the name Artifacts, I I found it phenomenal. Because We're all in this world.

16:46 Especially in this group of people. We're here to build awesome things and share them with the world. Steve Jobs had this awesome speech about It's it's like our form of giving back. To the world.

16:58 Is to try and do the best possible job we can. And share it with the world. And so The idea that when we talk We would

17:10 Not have the power To make those ideas a reality. Seems to be a little bit more. It seems like an L to me. А водлав то сі пів

17:21 constantly live in the product. Be in the design. Spend time tuning and try out new ideas. And that's what the ideal

17:31 Work of the future should look like. And less about kind of again, that abstraction, that being removed from the product. Or even the sometimes I can feel powerless. To not be able to change something.

17:47 This happens a lot when departments collaborate within an organization. marketing wants design to do something, marketing wants engineering to do something. Engineering is a design. It go it c cuts all ways, right? Like One of the things that people had got excited about that we published on the Verse blog was about design engineering. Because uh a lot of the people that

18:08 We're noticing were be being very successful at Verseal. were people that had both the design and engineering skills. And that is was actually another huge motivator and inspiration for V zero because we realize that People could be more full stack. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and and what we can

18:31 We can dream about making possible on this on these web surfaces. Okay. And so You could imagine

18:39 Removing all those limitations. uh a designer that can ship a fully baked product. A product manager that can Prototype and shift to production. An engineer a lot of people that use V zero are backend engineers that never had the ability to

18:53 You know, sort of like they they could ship an API, they could build a great low low level infrastructure system. But to actually bring their End to end. Vision to life. These are sort of completing that for them.

19:07 So let me follow the thread on engineers. A lot of people are wondering, do we need engineers in the future? What happens to engineers should I learn how to code? Uh you're a longtime engineer. Thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career. For themselves.

19:21 Yeah, I think knowing how things work is the most important skill in the world. I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful. in building and shipping amazing products and building gigantic companies and and everything you could imagine. Where a single person can do the job of a hundred different people. In a hundred different specializations.

19:45 Take the example of One skill set that's really important to build a a front end product Is you need to know how to Use CSS or Tailwind to style it.

20:00 And Once upon a time I would hire people that were truly specialists in this task. The sta the task of There's a figma design, or there is some kind of sketch.

20:13 And translating that into reality Because they knew really well How to manipulate layouts layout code. Box model code, we call it.

20:25 And Borders, paddings, margins, flex box, all these technologies for styling. And notice I actually use the word translation. very intentionally because The origin of the LM.

20:41 goes to s or to transform architecture at least. goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were Generative

20:54 L Techniques, basically. That's how they cross that chasm of like Remember translating tools who are horrible and then

21:03 When they The problem's just solved. Right. And uh I look at I look at um

21:09 A lot of the programm jobs to be done that used to be specializations that I think Are going away in a way. Or the tasks to be done. Their translation.

21:21 Tasks. We were translating from a screenshot or intent or a design. into a React and Tailwind and CSS implementation. And right now the zero. is incredibly good at doing that.

21:37 It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out. I run this test of like converting my own website. And try to generate it with the zero. Last time I did it, it had taken me like ten prompts.

21:54 Keep in mind I'm an expert front end engineer that's been, you know, in the arena. Since I'm like ten years old. And I'm thirty five now. And so I do that test because it's almost like a test of like self imposed humility of like I remember exactly how long it took me

22:10 to build my website with NextJS, the framework that I created. And ship it. And so with the last model it took me maybe ten, fifteen prompts. With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from

22:24 the design intent into working implementation. Another anecdote that I like to share with people is The model because V zero Try to embed all of the best practices of

22:38 The model output more accessible code. Than when I wrote. It follows the accessibility guidelines. that the web standards consortiums put out better Than I did.

22:52 Because he just knows everything. And so that those Task where you can almost model it to a translation task. Definitely going away. But knowing how things work under the hood. Notice all the

23:03 I'm using a specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying C S I'm saying layout. I'm s I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is gonna be very important for you.

23:16 Because you're gonna be able to influence the model. And make it follow your intention a lot better. And so the TLDR would be Knowing how things work. The symbolic systems

23:29 And that will mean that you have to probably go Into each subject with less depth. I have engineers at Urcell that know every single CSS property by heart. They know when they became available in a certain web browser. They've been tracking this specification.

23:46 Like it's almost like you're incyclopedia of knowledge of each CSS property. You probably won't need that in the future. And probably that's Good. Because you'll free up your mind. For more ambitious things.

24:00 That is fascinating. a skill that will continue to be valuable in the future. Uh, no matter and but I wanna push on this a little bit, no matter how far AI gets is understanding the conceptually how software works. Back insists, databases, CSS is a thing.

24:17 Uh So say I don't know if you have kids, whether you have kids or not just Say they were like trying to decide. What should I learn to be, you know, to thrive in this future. Well, how would you summarize it? Like how far should they get into software engineering? Great question, because I I have five kids.

24:34 And I've already enrolled them in this school of G. Myself. I in the sense that I'm already guiding them towards the things that I think are gonna be very useful to them. So Understanding how things work. Needs

24:47 I think the ability to understand the fundamental logic behind things, incredibly valuable. So I push them really hard on math. Uh, if you don't know math really well, you're out of my house. Just kidding. But like It's a it's a it's a fundamental like

25:02 Skill that I want them to know. Eloquence. So I joke sometimes Have you heard a meme of Word cells?

25:12 Versus shape rotators. Yeah. So A shape rotator is someone that only has a math brain. Right. You could argue the the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shape rotators because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status respect.

25:30 net worth, whatever. And then there's the word cells, which is Communicating. More of the liberal arts. There's also the

25:38 funny and awesome slide of Apple saying that they are at the intersection of liberal arts And technology, I've always had immense amounts of respect for both sides of the brain, so to speak. But I think developing great eloquence. In knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about. Knowing how to refer to things.

25:59 In that global mental map of Symbolic systems. Will be highly valuable. And we have some tools to help people prompt better. But

26:09 Prompt enhancement and embellishment. cannot replace thinking. And cannot replace your own creativity that you want to infuse into the world. So one of the things that V zero does is It tries

26:21 It's It succeeds, I think. Uh Creating very nice designs out of the box. We try to infuse what we've learned about

26:31 What do people think is typically good web design, we've influenced the model. In that direction. But still, like we also don't want the whole internet to look the same way. So your ability to steer the model with your words.

26:45 into those references, into those inspirations is gonna be very important. I actually have an an amazing anecdote. We hosted a Yeah. Design demo night. at the Verse HQ in San Francisco last night.

26:59 And we're showing off how Verse uses the zero. To build V Zero and to build Vercelle. And one of our designers showed this amazing animation. That he built. Actually two uh two amazing animations that he built.

27:13 And In one of them it was this amazing triangle. That had A an animation that I didn't think was possible. To make.

27:22 And that it was all built with Vizera. And he used the word Turbulence. To describe the effect that he wanted. So I just wanna call out that to people because

27:32 The difference between knowing that word and not knowing it. Is getting that style. into that beautiful triangle that he created that was interactive and it's probably gonna end up in some landing page soon that you're gonna visit on Vercelle.com. And so developing Eloquence

27:49 And your linguistic ability, I think is gonna be very important. So I love my kids to know that. And I think that idea of sharing things and putting yourself out there and and and broadcasting to the world. So another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons.

28:10 We just went to an awesome hackathon at uh University of San Francisco USF. It was called the Bloom Hackathon and it took two of my kids. And I wanted to watch how people presented their ideas. And they had we had a lot of fun. We also ate waffles and

28:25 Uh Grill sandwiches, which is a bonus. But Um so pres presenting. In putting yourself out there.

28:32 I I I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast when we were chatting I learned so much from you and your guests because you put out all this Awesome little post on X. in this videos and this is snippets of your interviews. And so

28:46 The ability to present what you've built. And put yourself out there. incredibly important skill in the future. Especially in a world where The marginal cost of producing software and new things are

28:59 Going down. You need to build an audience. You need to know how to talk to people. You need to build Your own signature brand and style. And so Maybe they're a little too young for that one, but I guess taking them into haggathons, uh probably like

29:14 You know, back. is influencing their neural networks, their pre training data. For the future. I love it. They're gonna tell their friends uh my dad took me to hackathon. What's that?

29:24 Yeah, so d are you actually are you encouraging them to learn to code? 'Cause it's interesting you mentioned math, eloquence, presenting, and then okay. Yeah, I think again. Learn how to prompt, learn how to code. Uh with V Zero, we show you the code. When we build things.

29:40 So That if you can build that mapping of like Maybe not learning how to code in the in necessarily in like the In as an abstraction. If you do have a knack for it, kinda like, you know.

29:52 I'm a big believer also that My five kids have like super diverse personalities and Inclinations. And I don't wanna be

30:02 You know pushing for something that they wouldn't want to do or whatever. And so learning to code in the abstract might be good for some people, might be good might may not be the f a fun thing to do for other people. And so

30:17 What I would recommend is try to understand how things work. So if if you prompt V Zero or any other tool. And he generates some code, try to build an understanding of what that does. At a at a high level. It's like actually a maybe an extension even of eloquence. One of the bets that I made early on with for sale that really paid off is

30:37 We Burcell m maybe as a metaphor is like AWS in easy mode for a lot of people. We have a very large user base of people that would have otherwise not have been able to configure all of the in ins and outs of the cloud. But do want the scale, flexibility, speed, et cetera. They want to create a very high quality Products and services.

30:59 So I like to give the Super Bowl example because w one of our customers ramp. I had a forty three Ex Increase in traffic. When their when their ad went live.

31:10 The engineer that worked in that only needed to learn Next JS. Then they pushed their code of cell. And now they can reach an audience of a hundred million people. Without a blip. A hundred percent up time.

31:24 That superpower. Comes from We made it as easy as possible. To get started. And the language that we choose is actually very relevant in this story.

31:35 JavaScript is almost in my mind has always been almost like the English of programming languages. It's a language that if you learn it You reach billions of devices. So it's not

31:47 A coincidence. That when you ask Chad GT Or anthropic. Or Gemini to build you a web app. It uses

31:56 This tools. It uses JavaScript. It uses React. Oh, it's become the lingua franca. Of building products on the web. So I would tell to make I would say to make it slow, if you do want to go deeper into programming

32:10 start learning there, you can reach huge numbers of people. If you have a passion. I would say There's gonna be a fundamental engineering skill that's gonna be useful for decades or centuries to come. Which is creating foundational infrastructure.

32:26 Think about LMs in the in terms of They're like Oracles. That can go and write software for you. But

32:34 There's a limit to how much software they can write. There's context. Windows. There is time and computational constraints. So

32:43 It's very hard for an agent today to go and say I'm gonna write a cloud from scratch. I'm gonna write all the foundational services. I'm gonna write the framework from scratch. I'm gonna write the compiler. No. The LM is orchestrating those tools and infrastructure.

32:59 He's not writing the compiler from scratch. Otherwise you get into the Newton thing. In order to create an apple, you have to create the entire underlying universe. No, the LMs are interoperating with the universe as it exists. And so

33:12 the engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably gonna be Extremely Empowered still. For years to come. Like there's a world where you could argue uh

33:24 Chat GPT will build the next version of ChatGPT. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long way away, if ever. Absolutely. This is why you know the j the common the running joke is that All of these companies have You go to their careers page and it's like

33:39 At Brussel we had Yeah. We have a hundred and fifty engineers that can write code. And

33:51 Six hundred p total headcount. Now we have six hundred engineers. One of the best things that I some of the best things that I've seen created with V zero have not come from our H team. They've come. from the marketing team. They I'm from

34:04 The sales team They've come from the Uh product management team. The product management team is it's fascinating, right? Because now they're actually building the product. So last night I saw how we've speced out In V Zero, think of it as like a live PRD.

34:19 We've spec'd out how the new functionality for deploying a B zero to Verse. Is gonna work. The amount of detail that was contained in that be zero. I mean I was we're all just saying that we'll just ship it. There's nothing else with this gas, right? Like

34:36 It was animated, it was interactive. We were demonstrated the error state, the success state. The Slow stream state. So

34:46 It really empowers Product builders. Not only with technical skills, I think that does a disservice to the tool. It empowers them to explore.

34:55 And augment their thinking. With a lot of things that perhaps they wouldn't have considered otherwise. A lot of states of the product they wouldn't have considered otherwise. The name V0 implies the product is for prototypes for kind of like the first attempt at stuff, and that's definitely where All these tools are Or finding product market fit, prototypes, PMs showing a thing uh working versus just design.

35:19 Do you expect V Zero and other tools to get to a place where you can Building. Salesforce dot com and scale it to billions of dollars. Do you You do. Okay. We already we already have a customer, an enterprise customer of B Zero. uh that only works with V zero.

35:34 All their products, all their features, all their client communications. R B zero native. Two days ago I just heard Anecdotally on X, someone tell me My brother just sold his first website to a client completely built in V Zero.

35:52 Yesterday at an investor conference, an investor walks up to me and says Two of my friends just got engaged on V Zero. I was like, Okay, okay, V Zero is a dating app now. So the The engagement website, the proposal, the wedding, like It's all V zero native. So Because we've integrated V zero the Verse infrastructure.

36:11 We can do that whole a story that I just told you of like I have A website to build. And it can get it in front of a hundred million people. We can enable that for everybody now.

36:23 And so the end to end Full stack. V zero native and built on these awesome fluid serverless infrastructure that scales to billions of people.

36:34 All just for from prompts or screenshots or Uh just Copying and pasting your PRDs into the tool. So let's let's help people be successful with Vzier and then let's also do a demo, but before we get there

36:46 Let me ask you this. So imagine you could magically sit next to Someone who's about to use V zero for the first time and whisper A tip in their ear. To be successful. With V Zero, what would your what would a couple of tips be?

36:58 So number one is You can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what do you ask the tool. If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have You're always gonna get better results.

37:16 If you're If you don't have ideas on on what to build or or what to prompt, I would recommend using the V Zero community. So that you can find something to fork to get started. I would say In some ways, if you have technical skills, this one is interesting.

37:32 Put. Have some suspension of this belief. Like what I like it humbled me, right? I was saying about like accessibility. So be open minded about whether the tool actually knows some things that you might not know.

37:46 And so focus more on the product description, right? Like focus more on like What do you want the end user to experience? What do you want the product to do? And And try to be open minded about

37:58 How well the tool can implement it. Um Those would be my main wants. You also have to have a sense of

38:08 Iteration, I guess. Um Think of think of it this way. If you were working with a design firm or an agency that you've hired. You will go back and forth and say, Try something else.

38:21 If you were coaching a an engineer That's getting us stuck in something. You would say. Try something else. It's amazing how many times I've gotten

38:31 Unstuck in Viz Hero by just saying like Just saying that as the prompt. B Zero? We need to have it's like is it you know, like you have a one in one? Performance review with a tool.

38:45 Hey. Way to talk. Try something else. What you're doing so far is not working. Yeah, it's it's amazing. Like

38:52 Fitness function that I'm keeping in my head. Is I really want to find the thing that I cannot build with Vizier. So I yeah, as part of the V Zero community, I have my own profile.

39:05 We'll share the link with people. You can see six or seven things that I've built. Uh that I consider to be pretty impressive. So for example I was flying from

39:16 Tokyo To San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight while I'm on the flight. So I open flight radar or whatever.

39:30 And I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that Flight Rader I don't know which one it was, the Flight Rader, it was like a four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had atts. They were

39:42 Not what I wanted the flight rater to look like. So I built my own during the flight. With the worst internet connection that you could imagine in the world. integrated into a flight data API. Called Edge Aviation.

39:55 So I I what this is what it told me zero. You're gonna build we're gonna build the best. Flight Raider on the planet. I didn't I wasn't um

40:04 uh prescriptive about how So it used a a tool called Mapbox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell him that. Or her, and if you know what what what it is. And

40:19 Subsequently. Once we cooked on the design. Which looks I would say beautiful. I then got more ambitious and I said, All right, let's like let's make it real now.

40:30 And by the way, that's actually how I would work. So it's how I like to work. I like to work Experience first. And that's also how our cell Was built.

40:39 Let's start with the front end. Let's start with the planes on the screen, and by the way, there's a lot of subtleties here. For example. There's so many flights going on at any given time. That

40:51 There's just too many. So I had to work with V Zero on improving performance. And once again, I wasn't prescripted, I just said, We have a lot of flights, chief. Let's Did you say chief? Yeah, I actually do say that a lot.

41:04 And Uh this is I think when I shared it on X, it blew a lot of engineers' minds because it created a canvas based Canvas is the sort of underlying

41:16 Rendering surface. that very sophisticated products use like Figma. And it created this awesome overlay on top of the map. That can render. Tens of thousands of flights at any given time.

41:29 And then I told it, let's make it a full stack application. I okay, plug it into the the flights API. So that's an example of like We cooked. And there was no limit. And so I'm always in the lookout.

41:42 The service that I'm providing to the V Zero community is I'm part of the team that is really trying to break this. And say like can it not build something? Or or and even when it does build it we're very obsessed with quality and performance. Like it has to be real.

41:57 That's the that's our commitment to to our users. And How much does this cost, how much time does this take to make something like this? So the the Flight Rar example or or V. Less than two hours. With a worse internet, I love you, but like you give me a hard time. And and what did that cost? Like like ten bucks? Like what would you estimate?

42:23 Um I mean I pay for the twenty dollar VZ. Twenty bucks. Okay, for a month. So it's like a month. But you use it for two hours, twenty bucks. Yeah. Uh if you had engineers building this, how much do you think that would Cost, how long do you think that would take? I've been

42:37 Weeks easily. Easily. And that's like tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe the most craft engineer out of our cell could knock it out in a like n without using any AI. Could knock it out in a couple days.

42:52 But then What about the design? What about like me?'Cause I'm the bottleneck, not the engineer. And this is what's amazing about this collaboration, right? Because like I'm providing the product guidance. I'm saying Draw a dashed line.

43:05 between the pla and by the way, this is a visit just blew my mind so hard. I said draw a dashed line. Between the two Destination airports. And

43:15 These just said, Well, I have to account for the spherical or what is it is a pseudosphere. Pretty Curvature of the earth. It's like okay the zero, super genius, like whatever, like

43:30 And so that's what I mentioned about like how you can kinda go back and forth. Product co pilot is like an all knowing being. W one of our users yesterday submitted feedback.

43:44 It was positive feedback, they were very happy what they were saying, like V Z, I guess, super genius. Five year old PHD. with ADHD. So like you still have to like I'm not gonna s I'm not gonna oversell this as like

43:59 You know, it knows everything about everything, as it gets everything perfect, of course. But um but it n it has this Sparks of brilliance. Really, truly, I think I've been a big believer. that AGI under sells

44:14 What we're collectively building. Because we already have all of this sparks of super intelligence. I don't believe that V zero is an AGI. If it knows everything about how to draw

44:28 a dashed line according to the curvature of the earth and this high performance map of airplanes. Like that's just superhuman. Um and it's yeah, it's it's it's a joy to use. Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. One of the hardest

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45:48 As you talk, it's interesting the way I'm thinking about this now. There's almost like three core skills in building apps. With AI. There's Figure out what to build.

45:57 There's making it look good. It's like design. And then there's getting it on stock. Yeah. And It's interesting how like these are gonna motion.

46:07 Coaching it, yeah, or just like here's a oh, here's the Here's like the database error. I don't know, it's not figuring it out. On the I guess, does that resonate? I've never thought about it. Oh absolutely. In fact, uh I'll tell you a little bit of a story of um something that I So

46:21 Even going way back in time. Next year has builds on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created. Actually with very similar Goals.

46:33 so many cracked engineers and they had to help them collaborate on an enormous product service. So they invented or at least pioneered I would say the concept of this Component. As a unit of reusability as a as a building block as a Lego brick of how you build software.

46:49 that L LMs love to work with React components, by the way. And One of the things that

46:57 always has stood out to me about that model. Is It's it basically enables people to scale in how they worked together. And one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing

47:13 Is they called it escape hatch. The API When when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system They give you scape hatch. They say okay, engineer.

47:27 You're On your own now? There's no guardrails? And in fact, one of these escape hatches is called Dangerously Set. Inner HTML.

47:38 They want the developer to know Uncharted territory. But they did give people The API. That is a profound

47:47 systems design engineering principle. And throughout my life I've always thought about escape hatches. One amazing scape hatch that B zero has. Is that You're looking at the code that we're generating.

48:01 With an XJS. You can edit it. You can even have other experts. Look at it. One thing that uh one of our demos last night came from this awesome company, Luma Labs. They're creating one of the most amazing video models in the world.

48:18 And they use V Zero and Versel extensively to build their application, their websites, et cetera. And the Design engineer was talking about how He was on a V Zero that had a hundred In twenty or so

48:33 Iterations. So is he deep? Into the latent space. He was in the matrix. And at one point he got stuck, but you know what he did? He copied and pasted the code that we generated and he gave it to Chat GPT O one.

48:47 In Chipu one thought about the solution. I honestly I'd never even thought about this myself. I was so blown away. And it does speak to I love that your third point of You need to learn a skill how to get unstuck.

49:02 It's like a profound like life lesson. Like it's just more a g generic life advice. You need to get Facebook actually had a principle. Yeah. Don't get blocked. Like seek to get unblocked, seek help from other people. What's fascinating is that you can h seek help from other AIs.

49:18 To get unstuck. And those escape hatches of like actually understanding And seeing the code underneath. And even being able to

49:29 Say OK now. Let's use Git. Let's turn this into A less More of a hybrid project, not just prompts.

49:39 But also traditional software engineering, the fact that that door is open to you. is extremely valuable. Let's actually make the super concrete and show people what this actually looks like in V0. So Pull up we'll share screen and then we'll do a little live demo. We'll keep it brief. I find people are like I get it. But we'll make it fun and brief at the same time.

49:57 There it is. I see it. Beautiful. How can I say help you ship? Yeah, of course. We're all uh Shipping.

50:05 Uh okay, so as I mentioned You write. In English, you yap. Into the tool. I'll say

50:13 Um for a demo. Let's create a Contact sales form. In the style of By the way, I had a typo, I don't care.

50:23 Yeah, let's get it. Is that of Supreme, the clothing company? For an online store. Now, I mentioned that sometimes people get blocked on like there is like a writer paralysis. This is a step.

50:37 So we added enhanced prompt. So now like You're tapping into the laden space of the model. Which has a random component to it.

50:48 And By the way, this is still not a substitute, it doesn't contradict what I said earlier. Obvious y knowing the the meaningful tokens. Knowing it. What

50:59 What Like the right style is and what it's called and whatever is still highly valuable. So The first thing that you're gonna notice is that as the model thinks You can introspect its thinking.

51:10 So We added this recently and it's been mostly inspired actually by the deep seek revolution, I would say. Mm-hmm. So the fact that when you tell it develop a contact sales form Like what is it gonna do? Like we talked about scape hatches. Okay, is uh it's gonna use

51:26 Shad C and UI is gonna use Tailwind CSS, is gonna use React. And this is your opportunity that If V zero is not doing exactly what he wanted This is your opportunity to actually go and sort of correct or influence or give feedback and so on.

51:42 So You're gonna notice it spits out a bunch of files. And It gives me the thing that I wanted, right? So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit here. So

51:51 Couple of things that stand out. Uh here that I mean as a again, as an experienced engineer, I can point out The underlying component system that it uses It's the same component system.

52:03 That the best tools on the planet are built with. This is called Shien. If you go to grok dot com today They're using Shat C N to build their UI, they're using XJS. You're getting that caliber of code. The other thing that it did is

52:17 People on social media talk about this a lot. When you use a global shared component system with the world. You don't want everything to look the same. So the fact that he was able to apply the style and he kinda knew what Supreme looked like was kinda cool. But now I'm gonna say. Actually because

52:33 I'm building a financial institution Make it more serious. Make it in the style. Of let's say Charles

52:44 Schwab. Uh change type bases. So this is the iteration process of like I'm gonna go and give feedback to the model, I'm gonna make it try different things. So once the that initial generation was already created. Now the model is actually acting more as an editor.

53:04 It's going making tweaks. And this actually scales to very large projects. You could have started with something much bigger. So In the meantime, I'm gonna show you What Luma Labs created with B Zero, which is

53:16 Absolutely phenomenal. I I learned about this last night. It already has two thousand four. I was telling you about the The power of our community. So by the way, you can just

53:25 Click. Um community here on the VZA. I'm gonna fork it. Because they

53:31 generously shared it with the world. Notice all the Incredible animations here. By the way, they shipped this. to hire And attract talent to their company.

53:42 I recommend them by the way, like you should If you want to be a brand designer. Take take them into consideration. Notice that it's an interactive, everything is AI generated. They use their own AI image generation tool. To create this beautiful frames.

53:57 These are all AI generated as well. And uh it's interactive. So like the there is the uh autoplaying functionality. This is actually a complex layout. uh an animation system that they build entirely in V zero. I was telling you that at one point they even got some advice From O one, so shout out.

54:15 to open AI. I'm gonna say. Make it Sebia. style.

54:21 Colours. So This is an example of like okay, I fork something, I already have a starting point. Uh my Bank grade contact forum is ready in the meantime.

54:33 Another fun thing to do is Um you can start with a screenshot. So I'll I'll use another uh Uh next J S user as an example, which is fortune.com. Shout out to them. They they built a slick website.

54:48 But let's say that I'm actually wanting to break into The news business. So I'm just gonna paste a screenshot. I could have also Yeah attached to Figma file. And I'm gonna have V zero V zero already knows Vizero's

55:01 can answer questions as well about the engineering design product world. So like I can S V zero. What is a newsletter Explain.

55:12 With a diagram. Use Lenny as an example. So this is also a knowledge seeking tool. Um but We do

55:22 It strongly sort of like quote unquote steered a tool So if I paste a screenshot As you can see it's cooking on Creating a Hopefully awesome news website.

55:35 Um Uh. I specifically asked because I think it's funny. To explain a newsletter With a diagram. So

55:43 This a uh this you can create again like Yeah, explanations, content, knowledge. Uh the creator is Lenny. You were a former Air B and B product lead. Uh I guess I should have used some examples from Airbnb, by the way.

55:57 Uh but let's look at here at w what it created with um Wow. With fortune. So notice that the I'm just noticing now the The cyber should have been in the center. Let's use the

56:11 I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. Let's use the refinement tool. To centered this I call this, by the way, one of the hardest problems in computer science is actually centering things. So uh That's right.

56:29 Centering a div. And in fact, look at it. It was a div. So notice that I did a precise sort of Inline prompt In in the difference between V zero and a lot of other tools is that Yes. You do have the code and code is very important, but

56:44 I call it code last rather than code first. You're living in the product. So is center that Um another website that I love Uh also built with Next JS is Semaphor.

56:58 So I really like their sepia style. So I'm gonna say use this app apply this Style instead. Including.

57:09 So you're sharing a screen sh so you used uh a screenshot to design to build the site and then I think a different screenshot to tell it make it look like this. Yes. And And and so the idea is that V zero can grok different aspects of what it needs to build. It can be functional aspects, it can be layout aspects.

57:28 One qu and one of the things that's also very important to know is We influence the model, so a lot of the things that you would have had to prompt you might get for free. One that's important to call out is responsiveness. So As an example, if I notice that if I do this.

57:47 It's going to Like make it work quite well in mobile. is going to give me that hamburger menu. I can now tell it like Аплайдат стайл. To everything.

58:00 In the meantime, I'll show you Uh This is actually to me very, very impressive. And I don't know why I've today I'm so fixated on the theme of C Sepia. But notice that not only did it change the background, I hope people can notice this.

58:15 It applied it to the Checkboxes. And it applied a CSS I'm assuming this is CSS filter. Yeah, I applied a CSS filter. Just for the sake of it.

58:26 Because I'm a nerd. I'm gonna look at it. But yes, it applied a CSS filter. Confession time. I actually didn't know. that there was a sepia function.

58:38 in the filter property of CSS. There were many ways to accomplish this. You could have also written the images or the videos to a canvas and like apply l all kinds of algorithms and whatever. I like that it did more elegantly than you would have. Yeah, exactly. So that's why you can't be too opinionated.

58:54 Uh with the tool. Um So I a another cool thing is I do like showing screenshots.

59:02 But I do want to remind people that The idea is not to clone other people's websites necessarily, right? Like It's just a cool demo. It's a simple way to show off what it can do. Exactly. Like take a screenshots of your own things, right? Take a screenshots of your uh artboards, take a screenshots off Things that people post in Slack.

59:19 And also don't hesitate to add functionality. Incredible. Thank you for doing the demo. It's I'm just trying to imagine having an engineer I'm working with asking them to do these things and not only just how annoying that would be. Like make it CPF. Uh but just how much time it would take from okay, do this thing. CopyFortune.com. It'd be like days, weeks. Here it's just months. Months if ever.

59:41 Maybe never shifts. That's right. Well something that I noticed that I loved at the beginning when you were Doing the prompting and that prompt uh improvement feature. Is it it basically is like best practices to make it look good and look better. Which I think is one of the more interesting

59:58 uh I don't know, levers to working with AI is it just has best practices to help you build things that are Beautiful and also Feels like there's this opportunity of just like uh helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea. Like Uh

1:00:12 What is the problem you're trying to solve? Like it feels like there's a Like a PM one pager step that should exist. Like how do you know this is a problem? What uh what have users told you? How many people have told you this? Things like that. Yeah, there's something to be said about the fact that over time were More and more.

1:00:31 Peaking into the mind of the AI. That in itself is becoming a killer feature. So the the deep seek Extreme the thinking tokens Moment.

1:00:43 was a very big moment for industry, I think. Because open AI did have the technology. But they decided that for competitive reasons, which you know are It's a reasonable thing to think, no banintended. they were gonna withhold it. And also it wasn't clear there was gonna be product and user

1:00:59 In product utility. Hidden. It was very obvious that people really liked the idea of understanding how the AI thinks and influencing Where it should go.

1:01:12 Uh, we've gotten actually amazing feedback and bug reports where people actually specifically point out Look, this is where the AI went wrong. Please fix it. So the more people we get on this product, the more thumbs up, thumbs down.

1:01:26 The more User feedback we get. And by the way, I'll tell you, like For people out there building products, my number one guidance or piece of advice I would give to any startup founder

1:01:38 Was Create a lot of opportunities for people to give you feedback inside the product. I drew inspiration from Stripe. Uh d in this was amazing for the early days of Hurcell. There was a feedback button with a very slick Inline form.

1:01:55 With four emojis. That would allow you to decide how you were feeling about They feature the product at that very moment. And that would go straight into Slack. And we were building day in and day out, just like streaming

1:02:07 User's thoughts right into our Consciousness. And Maybe we would get I don't know, like tens, hundreds a day especially in the early days, but maybe like a couple a day and whatever. When you're building AI products

1:02:24 It's a constant stream. of user feedback. So for people that are thinking about not building AI products. You know, it's It's gonna be hard to compete.

1:02:35 with something that has such a tight feedback loop with users. It's the whole idea. is to capture user's feedback so the next iteration of the model the prompt The fine tuning. the examples.

1:02:49 The Rag. Is better. And One of the things that Versal has done as a result of this insight is we've open sourced a lot of what makes B Zero. Work.

1:03:01 So Let's say that you wanted to create the V zero for doctors. As an example. You can go to Vercell dot com slash templates. And you can clone.

1:03:12 A chat GPT template. that basically follows all of the best practices in the world for like Really high performance awesome UIs. And now you can go out and build your own AI products. We've also open sourced

1:03:25 The AISDK. Which is a foundational plumbing. of the zero. It allows you to connect any model. And generate UI from its responses.

1:03:35 Not just output text. but actually generate UI. So maybe because I love showing stuff. I'll just really quickly this because I'm kinda excited about it. Let's do it. So if you go to Chad Versell at AI super quick.

1:03:50 You're gonna see this is the open source chat GPT demo that we've built. It can you can ask questions, like old school. L? But also You can ask.

1:04:03 It's actually. Finish this. This ask. What is the weather in San Francisco? We call this

1:04:10 generative UI. It's responding not with just plain text. is creating components as a result. Last but not least, and this is the sort of the zier style opportunity. That's asking to help me right.

1:04:21 An essay about Silicon Valley. Is going to create a canvas or artifacts style experience. And Everything is generative. But also users can edit.

1:04:33 Refine. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking about. There's all these startups that are building vertical AI tools. This has got like a little bit of a tangent. And there's always this like AI Stuff for l lawyers, AI stuff for doctors, nurses.

1:04:48 And the the pitch there is that these are gonna be founders that know a lot about the specific problem and the C Market. And so they'll build like the tools that are very specific to that. Yeah. I'm absolutely convinced that expert AI tools are the future.

1:05:04 There's an amazing product being built on Versea called chatPRD.com. It's the V zero for writing PRDs and it's gonna get uh these integration soon. So you could write your PRD with AI and then you can deploy it. That create it with AI? That's just an example of like a vertical.

1:05:21 that you can go after. There's also open evidence. It's like the Chad GBD for doctors, actually. There is an amazing Uh start up building

1:05:31 X ray. AI tooling. So the ideas I think are infinite and and what I've seen from Users of AI at Vercel, like for example, our legal team loves this tool called get gc dot AI.

1:05:44 Make it. in theory go to Chad GPT to ask legal questions. But someone out there decided I'm gonna build the best legal AI tool in the world. Is gonna be up to date, I'm obsessed about this problem. The CO.

1:05:58 Herself is a lawyer. So it's gonna be hard to compete with that, I think. But here's here's what I'm thinking. This is like almost the opposite, and I'm curious to get your take, but let's not spend too much time on this'cause it's a complete change. No, I love it. So you showed me this uh the weather widget that you just built. Basically it's like a little mini app that The I built as you're talking to it.

1:06:19 Is there a world where when AI when A G I is far enough and Approaching superintelligence. Can it just build you a Harvey? For example, in real time. Here's the best y uh experience for a lawyer. Here we go. We got it for you. Totally, totally. I believe that eventually, yes, but humans will always want to have some guardrails. The reality is that get G C is taking a

1:06:42 double job. One is making the best tools for lawyers possible. But also. Putting their You know, weight behind it. But it's saying like We've actually used this.

1:06:52 And we believe that this is this is what the future should look like. There's A sense of direction and opinion. About things. And I think left to its own devices, AI

1:07:05 I I don't know like it This is the this is the double edged sort of like prompt embellishment, like AI doesn't always know exactly what we want or what we need. It's still very much a co pilot, a partner, an assistant. is not really running our lives and I don't know that we even would want that.

1:07:22 Ultimately. Okay, I'm gonna go in a whole different direction. Which is uh taste. We hear this word taste all the time. It feels like a thing that people are always suggesting this will continue to be an important skill to know what is good, basically, to know what people are likely to

1:07:36 Find valuable and good. And I know I f clearly you have great taste. You're building incredibly beautiful products. V zero is clearly uh it's like the most beautiful by default. Builder out there. As we've seen.

1:07:49 So in terms of building taste, people are always like, How the hell do I do that? I have great taste. I know I do. I don't need to How how have you build taste, how do you think that is how how do you think you build taste and any advice for folks that are trying to improve their taste. Yes, I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. You need to get yourself out there. I think it's very important to Go back to that sort of like

1:08:15 Get into the world, ship things. Don't be hesitant of self promotion in a way. So being very honest with yourself, like building something, getting it out there, see how people react, go back to the drawing board I think

1:08:31 It's about exposure. At Versea, we have one of our sort of internal operating principles as Increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose Yourself.

1:08:45 To watching how people use your products. Even to watch how people use other products. And You'll develop that muscle. Like taste sometimes I think we think of as like this Inaccessible thing that

1:09:01 Oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that it can develop. And Again, the AI will help you a lot here because we try and Capture some of the universal

1:09:15 Principle of it. But there's also trends in the world, right? Like I'm not A super But like you can see that like everyone, like

1:09:27 Paris Fashion Week has like a theme to it and like there is some innovations that have been some breakthroughs, whatever. And so Try to stay at at the frontier. Or even try and define the frontier as well is is certainly very exciting.

1:09:42 I love how doable this is, increasing your exposure hours. Uh Basically what I'm hearing is uh Use The best apps.

1:09:50 Yes, it there's like a feedback cycle component to it, just like I understand these nuances, right? So I actually recently created a uh I I published it to my community at Pro Home V Zero. I created a chat GPT style interface inspired by Groc. And I captured a few things that Grog does that are just so smart. So On mobile web

1:10:11 When you press enter. on their input. They default to creating a new line. Because they know that the way that people are used to submitting things on mobile is not by hitting enter, like we would do on on a on a desktop computer. You can tap the little icon and like your message goes out.

1:10:29 On desktop they inverted it. When you press enter You're expected to submit. I think If you got a new line, I think a lot of people would get frustrated that most people don't know that they can press command enter to submit and whatever and like it slows everything down. And

1:10:45 You can basically prompt for those things, right? But you have to pay attention to the details and You have to you know, decide what you want to see in the world. And sometimes that means like either defining best practices or seeking the best practices and learning from others. Another aspect of exposure hours is that

1:11:05 You tend to over rate how well your products work. It's very important to give your product to another person. And watch them interact with it. Expose yourself to the pain of reality. And the more you sort of like submerge yourself in the

1:11:22 in the real deal nitty gritty of what happens when people use your your interfaces and whatnot. I think you'll you'll Come out stronger. More grounded.

1:11:33 Hopefully more humbled. We don't like pain though, and I like that this is a push. Create some more pain in your life. Show people the thing you're building. Is there like a do you have like a heuristic or number of how many exposure hours per week per month you want your team to have, or is it just more is always better? Yeah, more is always better. I mean

1:11:49 Then because inertia Is to get inside your head. And the inertius who think you know everything and assume that everything is going good and you know There are no errors, of course it's fast. It it worked on my machine. I I think it the it's always a push for more.

1:12:07 I I do sometimes little things like I ask my team to color my calendar. So I say like I have to have certain amount of like one on ones with my team. uh in representative my calendar

1:12:20 Uh You know Kinda kinda like meetings so that I can sync with people and see how the company's doing. Uh then I wanna have customer. Meetings.

1:12:29 And during those customer meetings I push myself. To use the products. In fact With our enterprise customers, something that I do is like I try to forget how things are built, what feature of next shayas or Versailles using, whatever.

1:12:42 I just frequently use their products. And I want the product to be great. That's all. And then I try to work backwards into the So a form of exposure hours for me is seeing what kinda success

1:12:55 our customers are having in the real world. And so But again, it's just a heuristic like Maybe one third of my meetings this week were customer meetings and I tried and watched them do. Another really quick one is

1:13:07 We invite people frequently to demo how they use the product. Uh live. Sometimes to the executive team to sometimes to the whole company. And um we disc we always inevitably discover Something interesting.

1:13:21 From the customer about Maybe there is something that they're In pain about or that we didn't know about or Maybe something was not as as intuitive as we thought. And I find with these sorts of things, when you do them, when you talk to customers, you have them show how they use the product.

1:13:35 You always like Why have I not done this off more often? Why am I what am I what am I thinking? This is it's just so mind blowing usually. Yes. I wanna talk about limitations of V zero at this point.

1:13:48 So what should people know about just like what V zero can't do? Like can you If you have an existing code base, can you plug it in and start doing stuff? Or is that coming? What else should people know just like, okay, it's not gonna do this yet, but Yeah, you can import code bases through zip files and Git is coming very soon. Uh you can do full stack development, you can connect to APIs. In the next couple of days, maybe even before this podcast is out, we'll have this very tight integrations.

1:14:14 So that if you need a database And if you need an AI model. Or if the AI decides it needs that. It'll just seamlessly install it from the Verse marketplace. And the resale marketplace has already curated some of the best infrastructure products in the world.

1:14:30 to store data to Yeah. search data, et cetera. So it's gonna it's gonna make the product even more powerful. I'll say Again, I kinda did that exercise and I do that exercise every day of like I I have a wild idea and try to see if it can come to life.

1:14:46 It's it's it's very powerful so far. Um AIs are still Very much a work in progress. They can make mistakes. We have it as a little disclaimer underneath the input. You you will find errors. our our fitness function and we've seen uh such a strong correlation between user love and retention.

1:15:05 B zero is actually their retentive product. compared to other AI products that I've built in the past, or or you know, little demos that we've done or whatever. People subscribe and use it. Every single day and our very Sort of

1:15:19 Like If they notice a a bug, they're like very, very like uh jittery about it because they're depending on it day in and day out. But I'll say errors are still possible, right? Like every once in a while you might get a runtime error or whatever. But a lot of the technology that we've added.

1:15:35 Is so that B zero is very a agentic. It has a lot of agency in how to act. So you're going to see very frequently that if it runs into errors Visual tries to solve the Solve them itself.

1:15:48 And um And then last I will say When Products get really big. AI today is just not as good at dealing with massive code bases.

1:16:02 But going back to that idea of the React component. Because we break down things into files and components. We tend to do quite well in that dimension. In fact one thing that Next Shayaz was sort of

1:16:17 Known for. Is that In order to start a project, you just create a file. And next J S will route to that page. It it was if anyone is familiar with PHP, it's kinda like how PHP worked.

1:16:31 And so It's so good that LMs are good at working with files now. Because it fits very naturally into our world and and if you can scope down when things get really big, if you can give it a smaller task. to work on a specific component or specific file. you decrease that likelihood of

1:16:49 of the LM not being able to reason over or very very, very long context windows. I'm gonna go back to design. We talked about how Vzera's really good at just Great design by default. to kind of lean into that more. If someone wants to

1:17:04 improve the design of their product. You know, most people are not designers. They don't really know how to make it look good. They don't know what to ask for. Any just tips and best practices for making their Up even Better. Look even nicer. Yeah, it was really interesting. Uh the other day I met with a CIO who of of a large bank who on the side does a lot of coding.

1:17:23 Or like tries out new technologies and whatnot. And I showed him V Zero and he immediately became a V Zero addict. And he texts me every day with feedback. He moved two websites Of his own. From another

1:17:37 Like sort of website builder type provider. Two V zero and Vercel, deploy them, give them a domain name, they're live in production. And then he said look, I have this challenge. I have this music festival that I organized With a couple of friends.

1:17:51 And this is what the designer gave us. And he had c this kind of like brochure. It looked very much like a print style design. And so He gave that uh to V Zero and the first result he was kinda like dinging me for is like look this doesn't look good.

1:18:09 And then because I have experience with it too, I said like Why don't I just give it the feedback? Like literally you know, uh the uh you were asking yesterday, like uh earlier some of the things that I've learned with the product and that was or or or or the best practice, what would I recommend if I were sitting next to someone? Not only You should not hesitate to give uh the the AI feedback.

1:18:29 It's so interesting, dude. Like Sometimes people will Press a feedback button. To tell us what they want it V zero to do. And literally all we had to do in many cases

1:18:40 It is can you just tell the zero that And so he sent me this message saying like Yeah, I just don't like the design. And I give him back a prompt that I would have given. I said like Ma I don't know what I said it specifically, but it's make it more

1:18:54 Jazzy, get it make it more make it pop, make it And so Trying and and And again goes back to like Try to

1:19:03 Draw inspiration from variety that The AI already knows about. So in a couple of prompts we ended up something that was in his mind Better. than the original print design.

1:19:15 Of that brochure that Concert lineup. Yeah, at that time it again I'm even learning. About what these are

1:19:23 is capable of and and the best ways to use it. But with design, I think. Unleashing its creativity with And s in seeing things and and playing with it is It's definitely super helpful.

1:19:35 So one thing I'm hearing here is just tell it. Uh make those look better. Make it pop. You can't totally. But it and if you can use tokens that are uh relevant, so

1:19:49 Neo brutalist. Minimalist. Newspaper like vintage. Make it look like a f uh telegram. Like you can sort of like try and reach for things that you

1:20:02 Maybe would not naturally come to mind and and you would be surprised about how well it can transfer those ideas into reality. Incredible. Too easy. Mm. Maybe to close out our conversation, we'll see where this topic goes.

1:20:16 Yeah, this uh tweet that I loved. That I super resonate with. The secret to product quality is blood, sweat, and tears. I completely agree. I think that's why I think my newsletter's been successful. I spend so much time on every newsletter post more than I think anyone spends on a newsletter post, like ten ten, twenty, thirty hours. And that's why I think it works.

1:20:35 Is there anything more behind that tweet? Anything you've learned of just the Importance of working hard, I guess, to create great stuff. Yeah, I I mentioned uh exposure hours is a good example of like look it can be painful. It can be painful to S your baby.

1:20:50 break in front of everyone and noticing all the other thing is that a pr a great product is made up of a thousand little details, right? And so you're never really done. There's a humility that comes from the process also of why the best product builders will say Nine no's for every yes. Because when you say yes

1:21:12 It's like adopting a puppy. A feature It's like adopting a puppy. It grows into a beast. that you have to take care of and is very demanding and Loving but also.

1:21:23 You know It's a lot. And Poops everywhere. So

1:21:28 You have to have a creative restraint and a Well you also have to have a give. You have to Withhold Sometimes with the respect.

1:21:38 Uh the real world complexity that emerges. A little thing that I you know, kind of obsessed about. I'll give kudos to the Mid Journey team. I really love how Mid Journey works in mobile web. I don't know if they have an app yet, like a native app, but like their mobile website is phenomenal.

1:21:56 And to get it to be that good. By the way, it's possible. It's actually possible to get make great things on the mobile web. But it re it's that sense of love and restraint in obsession and testing a lot. And using your pro your own products a lot.

1:22:15 Dog fooding is a great Mechanism. Obviously. So We use the heck out of Vercelle Envy Zero to make Vercell N V Zero. And hopefully

1:22:26 Do better. But there is a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the process. Yeah, you can tell how much you use the product. Like it comes through in everything you you say. Let me actually ask about this. You talked about how you have you said you have six hundred engineers. Uh no, six hundred people total. In a hundred people total.

1:22:42 How how is AI changing the way they work? Is there anything there?'Cause I feel like you guys are at the cutting edge of how How products are built. Where ha what's happening? Like is it just everyone's on cursor in V zero to build stuff? Yeah. Yes, but actually it's more profound. I think it's the everybody can ship. It's the we build with

1:23:03 AI principles in mind, I actually'll give a a shout out to the Luma Labs engineer who Said Well, I'll use AI for everything. I say I also generate the images for the website, you know? And

1:23:18 I'm seeing, for example, our designers that are working on our next conference. Generate All of the animations with video models. I'm looking at Are

1:23:30 Marketing team. are creating demos of how the infrastructure works With the zero. That are better than any static diagram or landing page that I've ever seen.

1:23:45 Z' or ex posts. is something that one of our designers created Which explains how our computer infrastructure works with an interactive demo. And until he until he sh created that By the way, he designed it and created it and we shipped it.

1:24:01 All in the tool. First of all It wasn't part of his day to day job to do that. He Yeah.

1:24:08 These years making you such a Powerful generalists. that you can step out of your comfort zone of like, Well, my job was to do only this. You can just create. We have a ritual every Friday. We had it this morning called Demo Fridays.

1:24:24 And so it's very important to create the space. For people to step out of that comfort zone. And use AI. So us giving permission to people to build and ship things is part of that cultural backdrop that makes this things possible.

1:24:42 We had a demo today as part of demo Friday of of our V B of Sales Engineering also creating an amazing uh tool that he's gonna use to help prospects under San Vercell with V Zero. So I I've heard from DevOps and infrastructure engineers how much they use It was like cursor.

1:25:00 to work on the low levels of the versal infrastructure. So I think Very quickly we're seeing AI being embedded everywhere. I just heard a product request from a customer and say was saying, Okay, Vercel, you sell domain names. Let me Let me come up with new domain ideas with with AI. So I just see a future where

1:25:19 AI become synonymous with software. I do look forward to it because we need to stop talking about AI at some point. I foresee I it's probably not gonna happen. But It is useful to

1:25:31 Remind people that AI equals software now. And We're a software company. We build software and we use software to build software. So And AI is just a part of that.

1:25:42 Yeah. Darma, what about? Beautiful way to end it. Is there Is there anything else you wanted to mention, anything else that you wanna leave listeners with?

1:25:50 Before I let you go. I leave you with my vision of the future, which is We ha we have this billboard in San Francisco which is everybody can cook. Um

1:26:03 It's also part of the Ratatouille film, the one of my favorite movies. I I look toward I look forward to a future where Everybody can get their ideas out there. If you can dream it, you can ship it. And also that when you use products and when you see the creations of other people and the things that they put out into the world

1:26:23 that we are collectively making the world better so Anything you experience. hopefully gets Faster, higher quality. Fewer bugs as we go along and

1:26:36 I think we're all contributing to that and uh I look forward look forward to that and Look forward to everyone's feedback on how Vercell can can play a part in that future. So to build on that, where can folks find you online? Where can they should they just go to Vercelle.com? Is it VZero.gov? Yeah, and go to VZero.dev. To get started. Mm-hmm.

1:26:54 Uh, I did mention the if you wanna if you wanna build your own V Zero, this is more advanced, but Check out our templates on Versailles.com slash templates. And also I'm brouch G on X, so you can DM me or Or or tweet at me at any time. Amazing.

1:27:12 Jeremiah, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Laney. It was so fun. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show.

1:27:36 At Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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