Guillermo Rauch on vibe coding as an enterprise unlock and Vercel's AI cloud ambitions

good.

Can we do the green text eval green text bench?

Yeah, we got the TVPN intern.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh, we'll let you cook on that and then we will move on to our next guest, GMO Ralph from Versel coming in to TVPN for the second time. Great to see you, GMO. How you doing? I like the action hall. Thank you. Welcome to the stream.

How you doing today? Do you think GPT5 could beat me, you, couple of the boys here on Dust 2 in Counterstrike?

Easily.

Easily.

Yeah. It depends on the frame rate, right? Like

on a long enough timeline, we're we're cooked.

We're cooked,

but we might frag it short term and we might be faster.

Amazing. Yeah. Uh yeah, we got to uh I mean, I'm sure we'll get to GPT5, but what's your reaction to the world model stuff from Google? Uh do you think do do you have an idea of where that's going as a product? It feels like a GPT2 level technology very much a research focused uh technology. I'm sure OpenAI is working on something too and uh a lot of the labs will work on it but uh what what's your theory behind the the the generative video game world model stuff that's going on? I mean number one super fascinating right I think when when we think about the future I always think about Jensen's the future of of applications will be that pixels are generated not rendered so as as much as we're really excited today that GPT5 and Vzero are really good at writing code that then renders interfaces

I think it's also cool to dream of a world where we're just going directly from GPU to pixel grid right And but if you remember like a couple years ago and maybe a decade ago, there was a lot of excitement of video games that were going to be live streamed from the cloud.

Yeah, that's right.

Where your input, your keyboard, you could have a very thin client. Your input, your keyboard, your mouse movement was going to be dispatched to the cloud.

We're going to have GPUs near you.

Google Stadia was big there. And then

Live was Microsoft game and is still Microsoft's actually still pulling it uh still pushing it very heavily. awesome tech uh but not mass adoption.

Yeah.

But if you look at you know a lot of these technologies are being really successful in letting people get more creative and test things out.

A lot of the use cases that we see for v 0ero and vibe coding are

almost like a communication tool. Like I want to prototype something. I want to see what the what's possible. I want to explore the latent space. And I think those world models are going to be incredible just to inspire what the future of games could look like, right? uh just getting ideas for actually then shipping them in a real uh 3D engine model. I think short term I think long-term all bets are off. Someone was saying in the chat, you know, junior devs are are roasted um or barbecued. I think that's not quite true.

Okay.

Uh same for like 3D uh engine developers.

Give us the bullcase for junior devs staying off the barbecue. So the bullcase for I think people in general is that you move from I mean the progression in the industry has been assistant

to agent

Mhm.

to team of agents, agent orchestrator.

It's still really useful to have a human be the one that's sort of like managing the team.

Yeah.

So you're moving from like junior dev to junior manager. Uh especially as these tools become more agentic uh in in the new version of Ezero that's coming up really soon. You're starting to notice that Vzero sort of splits the task between a little team.

You have the designer of the team. You have the PM of the team that's sort of working on the spec. You have the architect. You have the engineer. I don't know if you saw Cloud Code announced. I think it's like SL security review.

Yeah.

You think of think of that as having a security team or team of agents or security researcher at your disposal. So junior dev as like a vertical skill might be a little barbecued but junior nench manager so I think it's just going to be the junior dev is so much more powered in this world if you allow yourself to be and you keep up with what these tools can do and and and I think you you stay you know at the cutting edge.

Yeah. I mean the obvious bull case is if you're like if someone's a college student today they can learn to code truly AI natively. They don't have to say, "Oh, we're an AI native organization now. We have to up upskill and kind of retrain people how to think." They can just naturally start to think with these

capab Alman post about how we'll look back on, you know, 93% of humanity was subsistence farming. And if you ask those people how what they think about our email jobs, they'd be like, "You guys are crazy." And it's almost like in the near future, midterm future, maybe even long-term future, it's like the number of individual contributors will be extremely low and almost everyone will be a manager and you'll become a manager much faster. You'll just be managing agents and then you'll be managing people who manage agents. But the job of almost everyone will become managerial. May maybe that's what happens. I don't know. I'm not 100%. But that that's what that made me think. Someone asked me yesterday, you know, what do you think the future of uh the market of monitors looks like? Like does it stay flat? Do people get more monitors because they're going to like Dogecoin trader analyst when like

in the future everyone has the hedge fund six monitor set up or

in the future everybody's just going to be at work on their phone. I mean I've noticed that that what you know when I was an individual contributor I had three monitors. I was programming on all the screens and now I r I mean I use my laptop during the show and then most of my work is done on my phone phone calls and then and then firing off tech messages. Yeah, maybe maybe we actually shift away from monitors and go further into voice interfaces. You oh I call the lead of my agents and then that agent relays it to some

I'm very optimistic on voice by the way because I've now seen it. Uh, I did what we're we're we're cooking on a on a a better mobile experience for Vzero.

Sure.

And I was going back and forth with my head of mobile and he was talking to Vzero and I was writing down and a pretty f fast typer

but he beat me with voice using the local model on the phone. So there's still the question of like edge latency versus cloud latency kind of like what we talked about with 3D. But I do think voice is going to play an increasingly uh exciting role in in programming which is kind of wild. I would have never imagined. I I've always been about like typing benchmarks in WPMs. Uh voice is coming.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

How do you think about competition broadly in developer tooling code gen? I mean it it right now it seems like there's just so much demand.

It feels like massive TAM expansion moment. Every company's ripping

TAM expansion moment, but at the same time winners will emerge. Uh obviously you're you're playing to win. Um, and yeah, I'm curious, you know,

yeah, on some level we're playing both sides of the bat. We what we announced today that's really exciting is Vzero with GPD5 support.

So you can go to vzero.dev/gpbd5 and we'll use GPD5 in combination with our model pipeline that makes it really good at by coding especially for nontechnical folks. But we also on the Verscell AI cloud side of things, we open sourced basically you can create your own vibe coding platform powered by any model.

I was joking about this with Tyler. Vibe code me a vibe coding platform please like one. Make no mistakes.

Yeah. V code me a billion dollar company. Yeah. No mistakes. Uh but basically we are giving people that as a starter kit.

Sure. And B, by the way, the fundamental question that a CEO asked me the other day was, is VIP coding a product or a feature

or is it both? You know, it's TBD.

The case for feature is okay, so there's going to be lots of systems of record.

Think Salesforce, Snowflake,

data bricks,

and increasingly they're going to incorporate codegen capabilities into their platforms. they can use a lot of these capabilities that we just open sourced and you'll go to their the existing place where you have the data kind of like what we've talked about for decades of like are you bringing computer to the data are you bringing vibes to the data right are you bringing codegen to your own platform so

you used to used to bring like a bu like a you know dashboard builder and it would have a couple widgets and now I could just potentially if I'm plugged into some sort of data source some system of record I could say vibe code this app on top of it there's some tool retools played in this space zappier a little bit but yeah I mean this feels like you know we're getting we're not fully in the just the pixels are generated but we're you know generative UI generative application on top and that and that being bespoke and ad hoc

I also think it's important to understand the line between consumer vibe coding and just generating ephemeral software and websites and things like that versus enterprises which will have a lot of different use cases when I look at the when I look at the vibe coding market and I see businesses that are that that are almost entirely consumers just creating things for fun. I think that has to be a tough business because it's a hyper competitive market and consumers are flaky. They'll create something you know for fun but they'll churn in month two because you know it's not they're not running a real business. Whereas a a business knows, hey, we'll pay for this on on a long-term basis because we're we have a use for it all the time from this product manager to an engineer over here to somebody in marketing, etc.

Yeah. The the other side of the of the equation is how do you make these VIP coding tools work really well for enterprises? Frankly, the most surprising emergent thing that I've learned is just how much demand there is in enterprises for VIP coding. And this is because a lot of the the traditional thing has been the people that understand the business are sitting over here.

The people that understand the code are sitting over here and their communication is fraught with peril. Like they don't speak the same language. They kind of like resent one another. I love to tell this story. I was meeting with a CEO of a very successful company. He was telling me that engineers like asking a feature to his own engineers felt like petitioning the government.

Yeah. even though he's the CEO, it's like he's struggling to like make the case

and please like get me in your next sprint, get me this feature. So that coding actually solves that problem.

All of the PMs, designers, marketers, business users that previously only had access to what like Jira and uh you know to-do lists and project management tools and writing PRDS and so those kinds of things. They they weren't able to ship PRs. they weren't able to, you know, ship software and now they can. And so the the opportunity is how do you actually make this secure?

How do you make it high quality?

How do you create a guard rails? And those are those are tricky problems. And I'm I'm really happy that some of them are easy to overcome and at least for us

and some of them are active areas of research, but I think the the enterprises really have a strong case for this.

Yeah. Can you walk me through like tool use? I mean, we were talking to the OpenAI folks about GPT5 being like really like a summation of like standing on the shoulders of giants. You get a Python ripple, you get a web browser, you get, you know, the ability to kind of run cron jobs. Now, there's voice and, you know, all sorts of different tools kind of wrapped up into one multiple models. You can trigger reasoning chains if it wants. It can do all these different stuff. And that's actually the benefit of like this isn't just a bigger model. It's like a lot of it's a it's a next version of a thing. It's more like switching from the iPhone 12 to 13 than going from the iPhone to the iPhone 3G. It's not just a new technology that's in there. Um, but in the in the in the world of vibe coding, what are the tools that you want to think about adding? I know that basically every vibe coding platform uh you know recommends a database. Um, but I was we were talking to Harley at Shopify yesterday and there's a world where if I go to a vibe coding platform and I say I'm building an e-commerce website, it should probably just be like, hey, I'm going to do Shopify under the hood and I'll vibe code the landing page on top. But how are you thinking about the landscape of like tools that you could pull in o full open because there's open source repos that are like full projects that you could pull in and then just start customizing on top of. It's kind of this big continuum.

Yeah, there's a couple layers on on the foundation model layer. What you want is a model that is exceptional at tool calling.

Whether it has built-in tools or whether you register them yourself, this is a like sort of silent word has been going on. Like if you talk to devs, what are you optimizing for? Tool calling quality. Why? Because to demystify the word agent, what an agent is, it's a loop of tool calling that builds up context over time.

That's all an agent is. So let's to give you an example concretely of B 0. Vzero is becoming more and more agentic over time. One of the things that it can do is it can take a screenshot of the thing that's building and reflect on it.

So today I live vibecoded to an audience of web 3 and crypto engineers

and I told Vzero, hey make this dark mode and initially Vzero does me dirty. He's like he changes some things with dark mode and then it kind of astonished me because I was like oh I have to now explain to this audience. It then takes a screenshot, looks at it, and keeps fixing it. And I was like, this is literally a developer that's alive on autopilot. And the reason it's on autopilot is because he has access to these tools like looking at the web browser. Another one is research. I vive I've coded an example of build me a Substack clone for cryptocurrency news. And the agent didn't know what the cryptocurrency news were. So I started doing research on the internet of okay Ethereum passed certain price and whatever. So and then you're talking about the tools over the internet. So to demystify another topic MCP is really exciting because it's a new protocol for registering tools that your agent doesn't locally have. So those tools that I just talked about we gave them to VZ. Here's a deep research tool. Here's the uh screenshotting tool. And those will likely become the new services. When you think about like AWS of today, if if AWS was an AI cloud, uh which is kind of what we're trying to build at Versell, like you think a lot of those tools are going to become as a service, like bring me the research as a service, bring me browsing and screenshotting as a service and so on. But then you have MCP, which allows you to okay, I need to sell something online. All right, so now there's an MCP for Shopify. Now there's an MCP for Stripe.

Uh there's even crypto MCP. So it's really exciting like now it's like the ultimate choice for a builder and you don't have to go and learn all these things. You don't have to this is almost like a discontinuity of the valley trend of like if we build amazing documentation they will come. This is more so if the agent picks you, they will come, right? And so there's a lot of uh figuring out right now like how do I make my infrastructure, how do I make my product to be loved by these agents? And the MCP promises to be one of these first uh things that you are in control of.

That makes a ton of sense.

Last question. Uh someone on your team named Josh is in the chat. He wants to know what what does he need to do to get a Twitter badge? Oh

well yeah 100k downloads of the AICLI. I think we've been talking. Uh okay been thrown down.

Thank you.

It's on your work cut out for you.

It's burned into the immutable record of this live stream and the future training runs.

Best of luck you accountable now.

We're going to hold you accountable to that GMO. Great seeing you. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations.

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