Vercel's Guillermo Rauch on AI and the Future of Coding - Ep. 47

I think a lot of developers are probably thinking okay is it even worth it to be able to code right now I don't think I would identify today even as a coder even though that's what I obsessed about for years since I'm like 10 years old Trent has been away from the implementation detail which is the code and towards the end goal which is to deliver a great product or a great experience one of our Enterprise customers for vzero is a company that has been in the cloud space since the cloud was born literally like in the room where the cloud was invented and they told me we have it as a rule that

we don't do code they showed me their slack conversations it's just them sending vzer back and forth there's no GitHub there's no infra there's no anything there's just Building Products when things are specific skills machines tend to take them over over time if your skill when you were a kid was like I can do math in my head really well awesome great asset to have I love it but also there's a specific machine that can do that skill also very well and even

better than you and so what I try to separate is what are the meta skills that are not as easily replicated by machines that you should still nurture and I think those tend to be more around very high level conceptual thinking what's about to become possible yeah that I can start cooking on now [Music] [Music]

GMA welcome to the show thanks for having me so for people who don't know you are the co-founder and CEO of verell uh you're also the creator of next and sakao um which is very close to my heart I told you when we met that uh uh it was sakio is the reason I could build my last company so I appreciate all you've done for the developer ecosystem just met some folks last night that said the same it's it's nice to get recognition for open source and but I'm thankful to the people that maintain those projects yeah so yeah um so we have a lot to talk about I really like in general in this

conversation want to talk about the um the future of programming with AI I want to talk about vzero and and what you're doing with forell um but where I want to start is I was like before this interview I was thinking about like the kinds of things that it seems like you're interested in building and the and the kind of like taste that you have and um and and then think about how that might apply in this sort of AI era and where I kind of came to and I'll admit 01 was involved a

little bit in this1 was involved in the preproduction where what I kind of came to to is it seems like you're very good at um playing at the edges of what's possible technically um looking for where there's like um something that's new and valuable but like pragmatically valuable but still pretty messy and then coming up with like a very clean opinionated Z config solution to it so like I would

put Sako in that bucket I put NEX in that bucket I think forel is that in that bucket so one is I'm curious if you feel like that's that's kind of I mean if1 came up with that it's it's over that's pretty good like I I'll tell you like it's funny I was having conversation with one of my co-workers the other day and I was giving them the example of socket AO as when I started the project websocket was which is the underlying technology that they later become a part of web browsers yeah for context maybe everyone doesn't know about Socko it enables real-time chat

real-time communication it Powers websites like perplexity and when I created that developer tool websocket was in its infancy yeah so to your point you kind of want to identify the wave when it's just a little a few drops of water but you have that you see that potential and it's also extremely messy MH so being able to go from I want to do something with real time to I want to create an application I think that's the vacuum