The Future of Code Generation | Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel | Ep. 20

you've been coding for hours and hours and he didn't even know what the output was. He was just impressed by the fact that someone could be so locked in. And so I think programming taught me that. It taught me how to focus. It taught me to be disciplined. It taught me to receive this negative feedback from the compiler and overcome it. I do think, you know, we'll need to find what the next version of that is cuz I don't think it's going to be programming necessarily. All right, GMO, thank you so much for making the time for this. I'm really excited to chat with you today. People are excited on X as well. So, so I want to get into codegen. Uh, but before we go there, can you talk about what you worked on before Versel, you

know, with Nex.js, other projects, and maybe how that fed into what you've built at Versel? I had a startup before Versell that I exited to automatic, the parent company of WordPress.com and it was quite a successful journey for me because it was my first startup. It's nice to have an exit. But also, one of the meta things that I learned, I was a CTO. One of the meta things that I learned is as a CTO, how can you, you know, influence your team in the best possible way? Like they are going to engineer the right things. They're going

to have the best tools. The one thing I did that was revolutionary for my team was spending a lot of time in getting the CI/CD process, meaning continuous integration and continuous deployment of the code that they would write, get it as efficient as possible. Meaning, you write a little feature, you push code to git, you get a roll back. I built a real time system. My background was in writing real time frameworks. So I was obsessed with real- time streaming of data. And so people would uh push to git

and then I would give them this URL that had a commit ID dot my commit was called learnoost. I think it was like learnoost demo.com. And so imagine that you're almost editing the internet in real time. That was the feeling that I wanted to give my employees. And obviously I did a lot of other things. I chose technology stacks and whatever. But when I would ask my colleagues like what was the thing that you know was most impactful to your in your time here. It was that iteration

velocity the the deployment velocity the tooling being really neatly configured. I always do the exercise in my head of you show up to a new company. Isn't it nice that Apple kind of figured out operating system and hardware and I give you a new laptop? Actually you look you probably I don't know about you but I look forward to having a new laptop. It's all it's all new and nice. able and that's only because they figured out this bootstrapping problem of like everything is ready to be used. I wanted to give that feeling but for your development tools to my team versus you get a new you know you're setting up a whole environment and yeah install this 20 million things

fight the tools and then maybe you get to work on something. Yeah. And so that was by far the most impactful thing that I did and I wanted to, you know, it was sort of subconscious at the time, but essentially wanted to turn that into a company. I couldn't wait to, you know, you have that insight because then I kind of saw that not every company had that. WordPress was really good at deploying WordPress.com, but I noticed

that if you had a new idea and you need to bring it to life and and it kind of makes sense like they evolved to host a really important.com and so they hadn't thought about that 0ero to one experience for any new idea that a developer would have and so when I realized that it dawned on me I couldn't wait to leave and and say this could be a huge business opportunity because the cloud was starting to take off and the cloud was known also for its reliability, robustness, it scale etc. uh but it felt like the opposite of using a new computer that is like just

point and click. It was this really difficult process of configuring and figuring out instances and and so sort of in parallel it was this convergence of ideas make developers really productive and happy give them the best possible tools I built next but also figure out that cloud part that a lot of companies would put off until too too long like you get to the point where you know I meet companies that are operating at massive scale that are afraid of deploying. Mhm. companies that deploy once a quarter. Companies that do code freezes for weeks, months around Black Friday and