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

0:00I'll say one thing about Vibe Coding. It's really easy to go from zero to one. I think we've all seen the demos of I promise something and it's cool. I think what's harder is to iterate on a project at scale and to deploy changes safely. Every marketer of our cell wants to change this page at some point. And the old way was one of two ways. One is what I call you had a petition to the government. You had to go to engineers and say, engineers, can you please add a logo over here or whatnot? or pray that the CMS was perfectly wired up for any ambition or dream or idea you had. So now they can just open this page in V0 and prompt anything that they want.

0:38It reduces the friction of getting something live really, really low. The humiliation ritual of prioritization goes away and you can actually focus your time on defending the merits of an idea on the actual idea as opposed to the hypothesis of the idea that then has to be implemented. And so I think it changes the speed of companies in a really significant way.

1:02So this is truly a first time vibe podcast that we're doing together. And I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Claire Vo. I'm a product leader and obsessed with AI. And I have a podcast, How I AI, where I teach people how to build better with all these new tools, including ones that we're going to see today. And I'm really excited to have you here. Gee, first, we're just going to get to the thing that everybody's wondering about. What is your most favorite feature that you released this week on VZero? Well, I'll tell you, the hottest thing in AI today is skills. And one is excited about the fact that we can now augment agents and AI applications and agentic engineering with skills, like skills that the model doesn't yet have.

1:50And so we launched Skills.sh. And the beautiful thing about what we'll show you today is that vZero can seriously go from prototype all the way to production. So we're able to conceive changes to things like Skills.sh. I'm going to show you really quickly. Skills.sh is a new, you can think of it as like NPM. It's a hub, an open ecosystem of skills. And it's pretty dramatic what's happening to this site. So you can see that we now have 34 ,000 skills submitted by the community. And this website has gone viral all over the internet. It's hosted on Vercel. But the most exciting part to me is that it was conceived in VZero.

2:34I have a quick question for the audience. How many of you have installed a skill in the last week? Oh, wow. Okay, a lot of people. Skill built. How many of you have the top three installed? Actually, top five. It's very heavy at the top. Right. It's like these are ribbing. No, I have top seven. OK, yeah, I have the top seven installed right now. This is a really great resource. So for folks that are maybe watching this later or haven't been familiar with skills, skills is now this standard that a lot of these agentic frameworks are using to help you repurpose and reuse best practices, step by step flows.

3:11And so, for example, I use this Remotion best practices one to let me import components and regularly create videos really, really quickly. And I would not have been able to do this without the expertise that's been packaged in these best practices that were installed with one line using skills.sh. I think it's also worth noting maybe to peel the covers of how Vercel builds products. Skills.sh was a thing that was just conceived at the moment of inspiration. we started prompting hey wouldn't it be cool if this thing took shape would we discuss for example what it should look like we've been calling this style terminal core because it looks a little bit like this is my contribution to the project i was like hey wouldn't it be cool if we make the top of the website look like a terminal and so the the process itself of building this was very much prompt driven lc like chatting in slack and saying hey wouldn't it be nice if we had a hub for this which is very iterative, very collaborative between the team members at Vercel.

4:13And what's really cool about this, again, is it's really fast. So it takes advantage of all of the Vercel infrastructure primitives, even though it has 35 ,000 of the skills. Like if I start like hardcore scrolling this and then pick a random one, all right, Swift, Taylor Swift. You're gonna see like the page transitions are, it's probably Swift UI, okay. But like all the page transitions are instant, production grade. You need it to scale. There were going to be a lot of eyes on this thing. Okay, so I think we want to get to our first workflow for how AI. And you just want to show us how you either develop this or how you and the team improve this over time using the tool.

4:51I'll say one thing about Vype coding. It's really easy to go from zero to one. Like, I think we've all seen the demos of I promise something and it's cool. And I think what's harder is to iterate on a project at scale and to deploy changes safely. In the case of how we work on Vercel products, We always work on branches and we take advantage of branch previews and then we code review and then we merge them. So we're basically going to be showing you today is how we brought those ideas of hardcore, heavy duty, production grade engineering to Vizier itself. So I'm here and finding that same project that you just saw.

5:33Now, skills.sh, which is piped into, is basically backed by Git. The engineer who built this pushed some code three hours ago. And you have this new button within V0, which is a new branch. So what this is showing you is that V0 is making the Git flow of creating branches a first-class citizen of the product. So I'm going to create a branch. and basically this is going to give me the same sort of like chat experience you're used to but notice here at the top i got this beautiful new convention of project slash branch right so i have the v0 slash route g branch and here within the preview you're going to notice that just like if you had cloned the project to your local device, we both have a full scale BS code editor, as well as the real project running within VZero.

6:40One thing I want to pause and notice, because I just have a laser eye for product, is I love that you use the convention that all of us with engineering teams use on our Git branches, which is who's the contributor slash what's the future. And so what I think this is really interesting, you know, we're going to talk about how you actually use these tools to build, but I also think there's a flip side of how you design great AI products and agentic products. And I still like the small design tweaks that make something like a V0 feel like a collaborative teammate on your tool. So for all the engineers out there, I noticed that little convention.

7:14And what you're going to see in the design philosophy of the product is that we really wanted to embed those little details of what makes a real engineering workflow come to life, but in a really easy way, right? Like at the end of the day, I didn't have to go to a terminal or boot up GitHub desktop and branch manually, like it's the stone age. Just press the button and now I have a branch running. So the main idea here is that within this preview, I have the full skills.sh project running. It downloaded dependencies. It installed the exact versions of Next.js and every dependency within the project.

7:52I have it all running here. I have it obviously within a staging or dev sort of environment. And now, you know, I could navigate it like I could navigate the production website. I could explore it. I could, you know, use all the capabilities that V0 brings to the table. But I figured, let's actually build a feature that we could ship to prod. Yeah. And one thing I want to pause on what you, I think, glossed over a little bit, which is the fact that you have this VS Code instance, the fact that you have all your dependencies installed, the fact that this is running both with code and a preview for anybody who's less technical out there, and maybe a lot of your users that are using V0.app are less technical.

8:33This, even like downloading VS code, getting your local environment set up, like I spent this morning with my designer installing Homebrew, like it just wasn't on her laptop. It's a nightmare feel. It's a nightmare. And so if you're trying to step from this like vibe coding prototype in web experience into feeling more like a software engineer, without having to have Claire handhold you through like brew install, this gets you like halfway there. And so I think there's also this learning aspect of it. I want to make sure people don't miss, but let's get into building something. So one, another part of our product development process is really listening to community and listening to customers.

9:13So people have been asking for a lot of different tools so that we could guide them towards knowing if a skill is high quality, vetted, verified, because there's so many skills. Last we checked, were 500 skills being added every hour. And so one of the ideas that we came up with is like, could we add a rating system? So let's add a five-star based rating system for the skills, put it on the sidebar. Be mindful. So I'll also give you like a little bit of my real-time consciousness on, if I were talking to an engineer and say like, Like, what could go wrong if we accept ratings from the internet?

9:58What can go wrong if you accept ratings from the internet is abuse. So let's say, let's sell VZero. Be mindful that we should rate limit or prevent abuse on the scores that we receive. And again, for me, it's all about thinking from a production readiness point of view when I think about the new VZero. And make it make sense within the style of this skills website. what so what i love about what you're showing us is you have this very very high sophistication prompt here which is make it make sense so we have three three incomplete sentences on a production app serving thousands millions of people so and you're gonna fire it off and while you do this one of the things i want to just call out that i think you know why this feature is maybe important right now is i don't know if you've heard there's like this crustacean crawling all over everybody's MacBook minis.

10:52And skills can be a prompt injection vector for things. And so as you're trying to make sure that this becomes the centralized hub for discovering skills, which I think it's starting to be, it is upon you to kind of make sure that the quality is there. At least you have the right thing, right things in place so people can make good decisions. And also maybe to follow with your analogy, this is a little bit like we're vibe coding on top, github.com or npmjs.com. It's like a really, really big deal. All right. So I was going to walk you through what V0 is doing, which, of course, if you've used V0 before, everyone does the whole talk over the thinking trace because agents are not the fastest.

11:29But I do want to point out a few things that are really important. So V0 is all about leveraging the integration and marketplace capabilities of ourself. So in this case, it knows what the data source is of this project, right? We're storing data in Redis by AppStash. Obviously, it's going to go through the whole file system. It's going to try to interpret my requirements. This is already really nice to see that it's not inventing a new way to store the data. It's actually paying attention to the data that I use. And so we'll take a look at, again, here. It actually gave me something that meets my requirements.

12:09It fits within the design style. I can submit a rating. It stores the rating. So I have now my five star one rating. I guess I'm going to... It's terminal core. It's quick core for real. You got your monospace font. Let's refresh the page to see that persistence actually works. Beautiful. There's a tiny bit of layout shift that triggers my neurosis. So we'll tell it, hey, when we don't have data, make sure there's no layout shift. By the way, for those of you that are like less neurotic, I guess. so it bothered me that when we refreshed the page when we didn't have data get like it jittered the sidebar a little bit so we're just gonna have easier so while we're uh jibber jabbering while the it's thinking which i have to get very good at as a podcast so i will call out that i have observed a versell internal hackathon and i have seen this man screenshot like rounded corners that are not right and just put them in the chat with like a question mark and so So it speaks to my very attention to detail heart that you saw that didn't work.

13:16Yeah, no, I'm fairly satisfied. Like the skeleton was stable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zero layout shift. So let's continue with the, we talked about this hardcore engineering workflow. Like if we were making a change like this on Skills Outish Age, again, receiving hundreds of skills per hour, with lots of visitors, we first want to make sure that things work, right? And right now you can think of this as a very capable dev environment. We're booting up the Next.js dev server in a virtual machine. It's basically very true to the actual end results. In fact, thank you to the Next.js engineers who sweated all the details of mirroring to the best of their ability, the dev environment and the production environment.

14:03But there is another layer of assurance that we can get, right? Which is, so if you're more familiar with the GitHub world, the GitHub side of things, you know that when you push a new PR to GitHub, this beautiful Vercel bot comes to sort of save the day, right? You know that it builds what you're changing and then it previews it. Not only that, but notice that V0 really cooks. V0 is making me look so good here because I haven't written a PR description in like 25 years, 84 years. So Vizirian produced the PR, described it. And then the magic of her cells coming in, right? So it's giving me that preview.

14:45So I'm going to open it here. I'm going to say visit preview. I'm just, again, I'm going to be a software engineer for a second. Can we appreciate how quickly that preview branch deployed? Well, don't trigger me because it can be 10 times quicker. But yeah, I'm proud of it. Question mark, explain. Now I have a production-like environment. So when you see this URL ending on.vrcela.sh,.vrcela.sh is our enterprise Vrcela environment. That's why I had the 17 steps of logging in. But this is basically running on the production-grade CDN, on the production-grade rendering infrastructure, hosting infrastructure, etc.

15:20So now when I'm seeing that rating there, I have pretty good confidence. I was like, yeah, this is shippable. Okay, so I have to ask a couple of questions about the inside-the-house view of this. is this how you all are shipping code or is this a big chunk of how you're shipping code to this? Is it 100 %? How are you actually using this for production? So it's really interesting. When we cook on a project or a product internally, we hold ourselves to the same sort of high bar as if you had launched a product externally because you want to make sure that people are actually adopting it, right? And so before we started chatting, and I'm going to give you a glimpse of, again, the behind the scenes of Vercel, We've talked a lot publicly about our data analyst agent, DZero.

16:04Yes, we're very creative with names. We take the first initial and we add a zero. So this is our data AI-powered assistant. And I was actually asking it. I said, DZero, this is me, by the way, tell me about PR's merge with DZero in the recent weeks. Tell me about its growth. So again, PRs merged with DZero is a totally novel thing. And DZero cooked. Thank you, DZero. It said PRs merged via DZero have seen explosive growth in the last week. Wow, explosive growth. I have to appreciate whoever prompt managed this one because it did not put the explosion emoji in there, which I think would also trigger G.

16:47We should. Yeah. True warning. Starting from near zero in early January, the feature hit 3 ,200 PRs merged per day by January 28, 29, which is basically today. And extraordinary 100x. The bots, the AIs do like to like, yeah, like sweet talk us, but it's pretty amazing. So this is in very, very, very early preview, right? Like we're just letting people in. But I mean, this is just such a beautiful workflow. I mean, imagine triggering a task like this from your phone, from Slack, from v0.app. Another convenience that we're adding is that you can take a GitHub repo like this, and I can go to the homepage, and then I can paste it.

17:35And so now I could import something that I already have and create a chat from it. so anytime I have an idea for a real world project and product that Vercel has in production I can now prompt so I estimate that this is going to change fundamentally how we work right it's also very visual in nature which is really cool obviously there's a lot of ways of like getting preview getting changes made by agents today out there in the world is that everyone's very excited about what what AI can do but this is actually showing me the the actual results and like things that are going to happen. So I grade it's really high for the kind of products that we build at Vercel.

18:15And I expect this to continue to have a lot of traction. So I have to ask you sort of operationally, how do you imagine companies do this? And one of the things that I'm thinking is I was chatting with Caroline, who interrupted you all and said, we're going to start the podcast. And she said last night, I was prepping for this demo, and I V0 coded something. And somebody saw it and was like, well, that's a good idea. You should just merge it and ship it like do you imagine or inside inside the company who's shipping code how are you enabling that as a ceo how does the culture support it so how does it not until now everyone could cook right everyone could create a prototype a new design a suggestion in fact uh moment of vulnerability because i haven't really even opened this in a while but like uh let's see if i have i've probably created a bunch of things that i've been suggesting to the teams that we could look at, right?

19:07Ignore this one for a second. So anytime I have an idea on how to improve the product, I nowadays create a VZero. Now, the difference is that until I had this mechanism to hand it off as a pull request to the engineering team, then I was kind of like playing in la-la land. I was like out there in this like prototype world. And now we have a common foundation and a common substrate so that if you have an idea, whether you work in marketing, marketers always want to change the website. Imagine going to Vercel.com. I'll show you a page that is actually quite fun at Vercel. So our enterprise page.

19:47Every marketer at Vercel wants to change this page at some point, right? And the old way was one of two ways. One is what they called you had a petition to the government. You had to go to engineers and say, engineers, please, can you please add a logo over here or whatnot? Or pray that the CMS was perfectly wired up for any ambition or dream or idea you had. So now they can just open this page in V0 and prompt anything that they want, but it would be somewhat irresponsible to just ship it, right? So with the Git workflow and opening up PR and being able to preview it, we can all build confidence that it's going to be a good change, roll it back if needed.

20:34And again, this is a website that's pretty large. What I think is fun about this from an org perspective is it reduces the friction of getting something live really, really low. And like the humiliation ritual of prioritization goes away and you can actually focus your time on defending the merits of an idea on the actual idea as opposed to the hypothesis of the idea that then has to be implemented. And so I think it changes the speed of companies in a really significant way. And you worked, I mean, to say the least, at LaunchDarkly. And you know that a true production-grade release process involves things like feature flags and experiments and things need to be measured.

21:16And there is events that are critical to report from these product surfaces. And so this is also where I see the skills that we can add to vZero and that you can contribute yourself to play a very important role. because sometimes, you know, like we're all operating on this like websites and pixels and whatnot. And we say like, ah, it seems easy. How risky could it be to move this button 20 pixels to the right? And so I think we can make vibe coding scale to that kind of rigor that exists within enterprises and companies at scale. Well, and if we're being honest on that enterprise, it's not going to be moving a button to pixels.

21:52It's going to be switching the emphasis. I know this because I spent my life in enterprise, switching the emphasis between contact sales and view the product, there's going to be a perpetual debate which one's the primary call to action, which is the secondary. Okay, so we've shown New V0, import GitHub, which I think is really great. Do a pull request, copy and paste your GitHub URL in to import it, actually push to production, make friends with your engineers, three sentence prompting, no more than that. I want to go to quick, because we want to keep this tight. I want to go to a quick lightning round with you and ask you a couple of different AI questions.

22:27So what is your favorite non, I mean, everything's a coding use case, I'm sure with you, but what is your favorite non-coding use case of AI? Well, I'm conflicted. My mind immediately went to image generation because I use, so we built a Bangor playground. I don't want to share screen again. I want to take it from you, but. This is, oh, no, I was just going to say image generation is how I got this pretty, pretty background. B0 nano banana pro. Oh, nano banana. So what's really cool that's happening at Vercel today is that we're building so many of our own internal tools and agents. And so we're building our own design tools.

23:03Like, for example, to create new images, we created a playground for Nano Banana. And I use that a lot. So I use it to make memes, guilt is charged. But I also use it when I want to present information in really cool ways, when I tweet, when I sometimes have to make a present my vision in a way that's more like on the image side of things. I combine it a lot with VZero because Nano Banana is really good at, again, letting me fire off 20 generations in parallel and then pick the one that I actually like. And then I toss it into VZero and then I actually get more fidelity of what I want to implement.

23:39So image generation is a big one. But also I'm very excited about video generation. We're going to be dropping something. I don't want to spoil it too much. We're going to be dropping something on the video side as well. and but yeah all all ai is uh i also i also kick off a lot of research tasks like long horizon research tasks uh yeah so one of the things i want to call out from a nano banana perspective or podcast is i've used nano banana to turn every conversation i think we're now at 118 workflows every ai workflow that we talk about on the podcast gets its own pretty consistent nano banana infographic.

24:17And so I just think there's just such undervalued use cases in both image and video gen. And I'm about to take this and turn them all into little mini videos. We also created a really awesome, I don't know if we've written about it yet, we're going to publish on the blog post. We have an OG image, like open graph card, Twitter card generator that we use internally that combines more traditional rendering techniques, but also image generation. So a bottleneck in our team was sometimes literally like, Like, can we get that social card to get the announcement through the door? And so now we've also sort of automated and agentified that.

24:52Every day, we're basically asking ourselves, how can we build an agent that takes over a task that we were previously giving to a person? And typically, the person that was working on that task is now the one creating the agent. So something we said at the beginning is we want V0 to be really awesome for you all to create agents, not just traditional web applications. So that's basically the roadmap of the product. So I have to say my favorite. So that's your favorite use case. My favorite use case of your use of V0, which I don't know if you're prepared for me to have this much knowledge about what you vibe code, is your agent to agent chess game.

25:32My kids are obsessed with this. They think it's because they got the AI chess board. Yeah. And now they're like playing chess at various levels. By the way, I learned a lot. So it was really cool. Like during the holidays, I'm kind of a visual person. So the chess AI thing has been done before, but I imagined this sort of, imagine like ESPN is broadcasting a final of a chess match and they're going over the shoulder of each player and showing the chess board obviously in 3D. And so I figured it could be zero generate 3D code, right? Could it render with 3JS and things like that a live chess match?

26:12And could it have two AIs battle it out? And so you could open it. So the zero-chess-match.racell.app. And the other thing, I wonder if I'm SEOed or not. You are number one. Good job. Yes. A little terminal core over here. So terminal core, of course. But so what I did is I started streaming the thinking tokens of the models. Apologies to Google in advance. We're using a very old model of theirs that is really cheap, but they're losing 2 ,205. At least they got five in. So you can see the thinking tokens of the models. This is combining all of the Vercel AI infrastructure. It's using a workflow so the game could run forever.

27:02the game could literally run forever or until i run out of tokens ai gateway uh ai gateway of course because we can change models like we could we could see like brock versus you know uh whatever uh what dropped this week when three max thinking uh but also i learned chess incidentally because not from these guys these guys are kind of dumb but uh you can see how it thinks through what piece to move and it says oh no because if i move it there i'm gonna get f so i need to do this so this is a fun to be zero created during the holidays yeah so i need a kid core version of this um i also want to see how much these models are spending to beat and lose well that's the beautiful thing about the ai gateway is that we kind of report you know for this prompt how much it costs you with this model etc um but see so this is gpt open source which is actually pretty decent and pretty cheap.

27:57Great. And then so on this talk, so that's my kids' favorite, your VZero. I don't know if they have a favorite, my VZero. It's popular with kids. I also got another parent reach out to me and say like, oh, this really inspired us and we're going to use VZero together to create more things. My kids, a DAU on VZero. Don't worry about it. So this is my second question, which is, what is the last thing you built with your kids that was really fun? So the other day, I brought them all to the office. and what we started Vibe Coding is, so now we want to do things that are more like physical AI, like bring AI to the real world.