One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying these years like a super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD. I'm not gonna oversell this, it's like, it knows everything about everything, but it has this sparks of brilliance. How do you think things are gonna change for product managers, for product teams? People could be more full-stack. 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 what we can build and what we can ship, and what we can dream about making possible on this web surfaces. A lot of people are wondering what happens to engineers should I learn how to code.
A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, they think are going away in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work on their 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 those were taste all the time. In terms of billing 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 you can develop.
I think it's 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've developed that must. We've already 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 Versel, which amongst other things makes a product called V0, 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 NextJS and Socket.io.
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 wanna 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.
他既是一位建造者,也正在打造一款将改变我们未来产品开发方式的产品。这一集内容精彩绝伦。如果你想真正了解随着人工智能的崛起产品开发将如何变化,以及现在你应该专注于哪些技能,我强烈建议你继续收听。如果你喜欢这个播客,不要忘记在你常用的播客应用或者 YouTube 上订阅和关注。此外,如果你成为我新闻通讯的年度订阅者,你可以免费获得一年的 Linear、Notion、Superhuman、Perplexity Pro 和 Granola。
Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rausch. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like Samo authentication and skin provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making a fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features.
请访问 Lenny 的新闻通讯网站 Lenny's newsletter.com。现在,我为您介绍 Guillermo Rausch。本期节目由 WorkOS 独家赞助。如果您正在构建一款 SaaS 应用,您的客户迟早会开始要求企业级功能,比如 Samo 身份验证和实例配置。这就是 WorkOS 的用武之地,它能快速且轻松地为您的应用添加企业级功能。他们的 API 易于理解,让您可以快速推出产品,并专注于开发其他功能。
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Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. Guillermo, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Long time listener, first time, I guess, participating in the podcast and the love being here. I appreciate that. OK, 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, builders or product manager? And in the category of engineering tools, these zero came in right below cursor and GitHub for people's most used AI building tools. So clearly, people love what you're doing.
访问 vanta.com/Lenny 可以立减 $1,000,网址是 V-A-N-T-A 点 com 斜杠 Lenny。Guillermo,非常感谢你的到来,欢迎参加我们的播客节目。谢谢邀请,我是节目的长期听众,也是第一次参与录制,很高兴来到这里。非常感谢。好的,我知道你看到了这个。我最近做了个调查,问我的读者作为产品开发人员或产品经理,他们日常工作中最常用的工具是什么。在工程工具类别中,Vercel 的得票紧随 Cursor 和 GitHub 之后,成为人们最常用的 AI 构建工具之一。显然,大家都很喜欢你的产品。
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 for sale, our company has been around for a while. You know, the way that I explain to people is anytime you're using the internet, if there is a website or web application that's really fast, innovative, hopefully is running on our platform. We're out there. We're running a lot of websites at scale. If you watch this Super Bowl recently, three different companies were promoting digital products that were built and delivered on Vercel.
So not only can you deploy your ideas and build them on Vercel, they can scale to huge volumes of traffic and huge audiences. So a lot of people know us because of a framework called Nexias. It's an open source framework based on the React technology open source by Meta. And it powers some of the most innovative products on the internet. You use Claude or Groc or Mid-Journey. You're using Nexias. You're using for sales technologies. So with V-Zero, what we're trying to do is, and it's funny because you put us in the rightfully, I think, in the building or development category in that survey, but what we're trying to do with V-Zero is help more people participate in building software.
Increase 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 GPD, we want V-Zero to be extremely, extremely easy. And the outputs that it generates make them as refined and realistic as possible. The things that you created with V-Zero hopefully live up to that standard set by some of the best and largest websites on the internet. I was going to ask you how V-Zero came out of Vercel. And my theory was it was like, you guys are sitting around, how do we get more people building websites? And it's like, let's just help them do it really easily. Is that, it's like Tam expansion for Vercel?
Is that, yeah, it's important. In some ways, I've been doing for not only 10 years that I've been almost working on Vercel, but maybe my entire life, because my strength as a developer is kind of meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So next to me, I asked this one, but before that in a previous life, I created another tool called Socket.io, which is a real-time communication mechanism that powers. For example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion is broadcast messages in real-time to other collaborators, they use a real-time engine that I built for Socket.io.
So the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because they took something that was very difficult to do, but very compelling. It was with real-time in the past, like it's building cutting-edge applications on the web with Next.js, and I try to make it as easy as possible. But you still need to know development skills, right? For us, and the opportunity was, if there is maybe five million react developers, which is the sort of the library engine that we use, and there is maybe 20 million JavaScript developers. How many product builders are people with aspirations of building products exist?
My back of the NAPKIN, like minimum calculation, is 100 million. And I'll tell you it's funny where I get that number from. Slack has about 100 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 shared channels. I love that feature. We talk to a lot of the versatile customers, and they tell us, like, I want to build this, I want to see that, I want this feature, I want that thing.
And so the opportunity with VZero was, it's not that you're going to stop talking to other people, but what if you could yap into the computer and see something happen? Build a prototype, build your first version of a product, build a demo, build a full stack product, build it and ship it. And so the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of herself. But concretely, the genesis of the story was, when ChatGPT came out, we noticed that it was very good at writing the code that our tools used. So ChatGPT, right out of the bat, was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind, which is a CSS styling technology, was good at NextShast, and again, the power of open source. Our tools were already in the training data of the internet. And so that long-term bed and vision and opens was really paid off.
And so because the models were so good at writing this kind of code, the idea for VZero came naturally from, what if we could build a ChatGPT for building web products? Speaking of that, I didn't actually know. So I had bolts, CEO on the podcast, and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked what they are doing. And you guys, do you guys sit on ChatGPT and open AI stuff? We started out on OpenAI, and we've always used a combination of models. It's funny right now on Twitter, there's a million, there's through with a million views of people trying to reverse engineer the prompt and the model of the user. And they're all finding that there is 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 work to another model. And so open AI, Gemini, Claude, but we predate Anthropic because I'll give credit to ChatGPT that 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, the first prototype of V0 might have even predated ChatGPT or at the very least, I think we were running on GPD 3.5. So we've always had this vision of unlocking more power for the web through LLMs. And there's a lot of very interesting technical details of why, by the way, LLMs happen to be so good at the task of web design and web development that we could get into.
It was like the perfect timing for us. That's what I want to come back to that. That's actually a really good question. But let me ask a couple other questions here. In terms of V0, what's the scale at this point? We hear all these numbers about all the folks in the space. What can you share about it happening with V0? I can share that it's growing exponentially and that over 1.3 million users have interacted with V0 so far. We had our largest day ever yesterday and today again. We're one of the largest customers of most of cloud providers at this point. We're hitting the limits of every GPU, LLMs infrastructure out there in the planet.
And the most exciting thing for me is what I'm seeing people build with V0. So we launched a feature about a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called V0 Community. It already has 20,000 submissions. If I'm sure people in your audience have used Figma, one of the things that I low it, Figma files that I can go and grab a starting point for something could be a logo, could be a menu. And you can start with something and someone has already contributed. Kind of like that spirit of open source. And so in less than a month, I think we've done over 20,000 community submissions. So we've learned so much about building AI products with this.
对我来说,最令人兴奋的是我看到人们用 V0 创建的东西。大约一个月前,甚至不到一个月前,我们推出了一个叫做 V0 社区的功能。这个社区已经有2万个提交作品。如果你的观众中有人使用过 Figma,你就会知道我喜欢它的一点是,可以直接获取一个起点文件,比如一个标志或者菜单。而且这些都是别人已经贡献出来的,这有点像开源的精神。所以在不到一个月的时间里,我觉得我们已经有了超过2万个社区提交。通过这个过程,我们学到了很多关于构建 AI 产品的知识。
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 seems like the easiest interface in the world because it's just an input, right? And you put text in it. But there's a little bit of a writer's blocks sometimes. So one of my favorite things that I've seen, and I'm even looking at the home page right now, and you can see like at random assortment of community submissions. And they have 1,200 forks and 1,500 forks and 1,000 forks. And this is every time people say like, oh, instead of starting from scratch, I'll start from this application that someone else has built.
And I'm going to prompt it to modify it and make it my own. So the community submissions are people building apps on VZero and sharing what they built. Correct. And look at the code and fork it. And it's becoming like a compounding investment, right? Like people share something. Someone else grabs it, makes it better. Maybe you use it at that point. In many ways, I see this as the next evolution of GitHub. Whereas GitHub was so, it was a marvel for software development because it, I don't know if you remember this, but like the initial little tagline underneath that GitHub logo was social coding.
And it had this democratization effect of building software. But you still needed to know how to code. And so what we're after is social product building, in many ways, like everybody should be able to cook and share what they're building. I love how 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 VZero and then sharing what they're building. And if 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 Git commit is super interesting. If you watch how an engineer works, they look at a problem, they spend a lot of time in their code editor.
And at the end, they say, I think I got it. I think I fixed it. And then they produce a Git commit. They summarize their intent and what they try to do after they've done the work. VZero inverts that. The Git commit is you go into the chat and say, please change the color of this button. 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. And as a side effect, we can also produce a Git commit for you. That feature is not online yet but it's coming the next couple of days. Spoiled alert for the group. And so I like this idea of we can create this superset of all software building with this platform.
And that is true to my initial intention with Versel. 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. So let's go to this question of just kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of people. Seeing these things happening, product builders that have been doing things a certain way for a long time with apps like this coming around, whether you could just type a thing in and build it for you. And it's beautiful. How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams? Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen?
I do 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 will be mediated by this V0 links, this artifacts. I think when Claude came up with the name artifacts, I found it phenomenal because we're all in this world, especially in this group of people. We're here to build awesome things and share them with the world. Steve Jobs said this awesome speech about, it's like our form of giving back to the world 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 not have the power to make those ideas a reality seems like an L to me. I would love to see people constantly live in the product, be in the design, spend time tuning and trying out new ideas. And that's what the ideal work of the future should look like. And less about that abstraction of being removed from the product, or even sometimes feeling powerless to not be able to change something. This happens a lot when departments collaborate within an organization. Marketing wants design to do something, marketing wants engineers, engineering is a design. It cuts always, right? One of the things that people got excited about that we published on the Excel blog was about design engineering.
Because a lot of the people that we were noticing were being very successful at Excel were people that had both the design and engineering skills. And that was actually another huge motivator inspiration for V0. Because we realized 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 what we can dream about making possible on this web surfaces. And so you could imagine removing all those limitations. A designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. A lot of people that use V0 are back in the engineers that never had the ability to sort of like they could ship an API, they could build a great low-level infrastructure system.
But to actually bring their end-to-end vision to life, these years sort of completing that for them. 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 your long-term engineer thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career for themselves? 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 everything you could imagine, where a single person can do the job of 100 different people in 100 different specializations.
Take the example of one skill so that it's really important to build a front-end product is you need to know how to use CSS or tailwind to style it. And once upon a time, I would hire people that were truly specialists in this task. The task of there's a Figma design or there is some kind of sketch and translating that into reality because they knew really well how to manipulate layouts, layout code, box model code, we call it, and borders, paddings, margins, flexbox, all these technologies for styling.
And notice I actually use the word translation very intentionally because the origin of the LLM goes to transform architecture at least, goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were generative LLM techniques basically. That's how they crossed that chasm of like, remember when translating tools were horrible and then when they the problem was just solved, right? And I look at a lot of the programming 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 tasks.
We were translating from a screenshot or intent or a design into a react and tailway in the CSS implementation. And right now, V0 is incredibly good at doing that. It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out, I run this task of converting my own website and try to generate it with V0. Last time I did it, it had taken me like 10 prompts to replicate it. Keep in mind that an expert front-end engineer that's been in the arena since I'm like 10 years old and I'm 35 now. So I do that task because it's almost like a task of self-imposed humility.
I remember exactly how long it took me to build my website with Nexia as the framework that I created and ship it. And so with the last model took me maybe 10, 15 prompts. With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from the design intent into working implementation and I think that I like to share with people is the model because V0 tries to embed all of the best practices of the web. The model output more accessible code than when I wrote.
It follows the accessibility guidelines that the web standards consortium's put out better than I did because it just knows everything. And so that does task where you can almost model it to a translation task. Definitely going away. But knowing how things work on their hood. Notice all that I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying CSS. I'm saying layout. I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is going to be very important for you because you're going to 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. And that will mean that you have to probably go into each subject with less depth. I have engineers at a Excel 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. Like it's almost like you're in a in secuplity 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. Not as fascinating.
So I'm hearing is a skill that will continue to be valuable in the future. No matter. But I want to push on this a little bit. No matter how far AI gets is understanding the conceptually how software works. Actance system databases. CSS is a thing. 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 and suffer engineering?
Great question because I have five kids and I've already enrolled them in this school of G myself. In the sense that I'm already guiding them towards the things I think are going to be very useful to them. So understanding how things work needs. I think the ability to understand the fundamental logic behind things, incredibly valuable. So I push them really hard on math. 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 skill that I want them to know. Elegance.
So I joke sometimes, have you heard a meme of word sells versus shabotators? Yeah. So a shabotator is someone that only has a math brain, right? You could argue the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shabotators because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status respect. Net worth whatever. And then there's a word sells which is communicating more of the liberal arts. There's also the funny and awesome slide of apples 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 and knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about. No, we had to refer to things in that global mental map of symbolic systems will be highly valuable. And we have some tools to help people prompt better. But 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 V0 does is it tries and it it succeeds I think at creating very nice designs out of the box. We try to infuse what we've learned about what do people think is typically good web design with influence 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 into those references into those inspirations is going to be very important.
I actually have an amazing anecdote. We hosted a design demo night at the Versailles HQ in San Francisco last night. And we were showing off how Versailles uses the zero to build the zero and to build the Versailles. And one of our designers showed this amazing animation that he built. Actually two amazing animations that he built. And in one of them it was this amazing triangle that had an animation that I didn't think was possible to make and that it was all built with V0.
And he used the word turbulence to describe the effect that he wanted. So I just want to call out that to people because 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 going to end up in some landing page soon that you're going to visit on Versailles HQ. And so developing eloquence and your linguistic ability I think is going to 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 broadcasting to the world. So another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons, which is went to an awesome hackathon at University of San Francisco, USF. It was called the Bloom Hackathon. I took two of my kids. And I wanted to watch how people presented their ideas. And we had a lot of fun. We also ate waffles and grilled sandwiches, which is a bonus.
But so presenting and putting yourself out there. 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 posts on X in this videos and this is snippets of your interviews. And so the ability to present what you've built and put yourself out there. Incredible, important skill in the future, especially in the world where the marginal cost of producing software and new things are going down.
在这个世界里,展现自己并把自己推向公众是十分重要的。我在播客开始时提到,通过与你和你的嘉宾交流,我学到了很多,因为你在 X 平台上发布了很多很棒的小帖子、视频以及采访片段。因此,展示自己所创造的东西并把它推广出去的能力,在未来是极其重要的技能,特别是在开发软件和新事物的边际成本不断降低的时代。
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 hackathons, probably like, you know, back is influencing their neural networks or pre-training data for the future. I love it. They're going to tell their friends. And my dad took me to hackathons. What's that?
So are you actually are you in charge of learning to code? Because it's interesting. You mentioned math, eloquence, presenting, and then okay, it's also learning. Yeah, I think again, learning how to prompt, learning how to code with V0, we show you the code when we build things. So if you can build that mapping of like maybe not learning how to code in the necessarily in like the as an abstraction, if you do have a knack for it, kind of like, you know, I'm a big believer also that my five kids have like super diverse personalities and inclinations.
And I don't want to be, 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. My may not be the fun thing to do for other people. And so what I would recommend is try to understand how things work. So if you prompt V0 or any other tool and he generates some code, try to build an understanding of what that does at a high level. It's like actually maybe an extension even of eloquence. One of the bets that I made early on with Versel that really paid off is we, Versel, 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 in synouts of the cloud. But do want the scale flexibility speed, et cetera. They want to create a very high quality products and services.
So I like to give the Super Bowl example because one of our customers ramp at a 43 X increase in traffic when they're when they're at went life. The engineer that worked on that only needed to learn next. Yes. Then they pushed their code of Versel and now they can reach an audience of a hundred million people without a blip, a hundred percent uptime. 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 the story. 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 a coincidence that when you ask chat to be tea or an anthropic or Gemini to build you a web app, it uses this tools. It uses JavaScript. It uses React.
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, start learning there. You can reach huge numbers of people. If you have a passion, I would say there's going to be a fundamental engineering skill that's going to be useful for decades or centuries to come, which is creating foundational infrastructure. Think about LLAMS in the in terms of their like oracles that can go and write software for you. But there's a limit to how much software they can write. There's context windows. There is time and computational constraints. So it's very hard for an agent today to go and say, I'm going to write a cloud from scratch. I'm going to write all the foundational services. I'm going to write the framework from scratch. I'm going to write the compiler. No, the LLAMS orchestrating those tools and infrastructure.
It'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 LLAMS are interoperating with the universe as it exists. And so the engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably going to be extremely empowered still for years to come. Like there's a world where you could argue, chat Gpt will build the next version of chat Gpt. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long ways away, if ever. Absolutely. This is what you know, the common the running joke is that all of these companies have you go to their career spagians like engineers engineer, right?
The counterpoint of that is that at a per cell, we had we have 150 engineers that can write code. And 600 total headcount. Now we have 600 engineers. One of the best things that some of the best things that I've seen created with V0 have not come from our Azure team. They've come from the marketing team. They come from the sales team. They've come from the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, right? Because now they're actually building the product. So last night I saw how we've specced out in V0. Think of it as like a live PRD. We've specced out how the new functionality for deploying a V0 to per cell is going to work.
The amount of detail that was contained in that V0, I mean, we're all just saying, well, just ship it. There's nothing else with this guys, right? Like it was animated. It was interactive. We were demonstrated the error state, the success estate, the slow stream state. So it really empowers product builders, not only with technical skills, I think that does a disservice to the tool. It empowers them to explore and augment their thinking with a lot of things that perhaps it wouldn't have considered otherwise. A lot of states of the product that wouldn't have considered otherwise. The name V0 implies the product is for prototypes for the kind of like the first attempt at stuff.
And that's definitely where all these tools are are finding product market fit. Prototypes, PMs showing a thing at working versus just design. You expect V0 and other tools to get to a place where you can build salesforce.com and scale at the billions of dollars. Like you do. We already have a customer, an enterprise customer of V0 that only works with V0. All their products, all their features, all their client communications are V0 native. Two days ago, I just heard anecdotally an ex. Someone tells me my brother just sold his first website to a client completely built in V0.
Yesterday, an investor conference, an investor walks up to me and says, two of my friends just got engaged on V0. V0 is a dating app now. So the engagement website, the proposal, the wedding, it's all V0 native. So because we've integrated V0, the versatile infrastructure, we can do that whole 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.
And so the end-to-end, full stack, V0 native and build on this awesome fluid serverless infrastructure that scales to billions of people, all just from prompts or screenshots or just copying and pasting your priorities into the tool. So let's help people be successful with V0 and then let's also do a demo. But before we get there, let me ask you this. So imagine you could magically sit next to someone who's about to use V0 for the first time and whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with V0. What would your, what would a couple tips be?
So number one is you can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what you asked the tool. If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have, you're always going to get better results. If you don't have ideas on what to build or what to prompt, I would recommend using the V0 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. But have some suspension of this belief. Like what I, like it humbled me, right?
I was saying about like accessibility. So the open mind that about whether the tool actually knows some things that you might not know. And so focus more on the product description, right? Focus more on like what do you want the end user to experience? What do you want the product to do and try to be open minded about how well the tool can implement it? Those would be my main ones. You also have to have a sense of iteration, I guess. 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.
If you were coaching an engineer that's getting stuck in something, you would say try something else. It's amazing how many times I've gotten unstuck in this hero by just saying like, just try something else. Just saying that as the prompt. Just saying that, like I mean, a chat is like V0. It's like, yeah, you know, like you have a one-on-one performance review with the tool, hey, wait a talk. Try something else. What you're doing so far is not working.
It's amazing. Like one fitness function that I'm keeping in my head is I really want to find the thing that it cannot build with V0. So I, as part of the V0 community, I have my own profile. We'll share the link with people. You can see six or seven things that I've built that I consider to be pretty impressive. So for example, I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight on the flight. So I opened flight radar or whatever.
And I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that flight radar, I don't know which one it was. A flight radar is I get four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had ads. They were not what I wanted the flight radar 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. So I, I, this is what I told V0. You're going to build, we're going to build the best flight radar on the planet.
I didn't, I wasn't prescriptive about how. So it used a tool called MapBox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell them that or her and it's easier with what it is. And 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. 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 versatile was built. 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 there's just too many. So I had to work with V0 on improving performance. And once again, I wasn't prescriptive. I just said, we have a lot of flights, chief. Let's, did you say chief? I actually do say that a lot.
And 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 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. 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, the service that I'm providing to the V0 community is, I'm part of the team that it's really trying to break this and say, like, can it not build something? Or, and even when it does build it, we're very obsessed with quality and performance. Like it has to be real. That's the, that's our commitment to our users. And how much of this cost? How much time does this take to make something like this?
So the, the flight rate or example or, or visitors, the flight rate are examples specifically just like, I mean, that one probably took less than two hours with the worst internet. Sorry, Jim. And our lens, I love you, but like, you give me a hard time. And, and what did that cost? Like, like 10 bucks? Like, what would you estimate? I mean, I pay for the $20 or these just 20 bucks. So, okay, for a month. So it's like a month, but you use it for two hours, 20 bucks.
Yeah. If you had engineers building this, how much do you think that would cost? How long do you think that would take? I mean, weeks easily, easily. And that's like tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe the most cracked engineer out of our cell could knock it out. And like, without using any AI, could knock it out in a couple days. But then what about the design? What about like me? Because I am the bottleneck engineer.
好的。如果让工程师来建造这个,你觉得需要多少钱?大概需要多长时间?我觉得,轻轻松松就是几周的时间。而且花费可能就是数万美元。或许我们团队最厉害的工程师不用 AI 几天就能搞定。但那设计呢?还有我呢?因为我就是那个瓶颈工程师。
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 between the, by the way, this is a, these are just blue in my mind. So hard. I said, draw a dashed line between the two destination airports. And these are said, well, I have to account for the spherical, or what is it, is a pseudo sphere for the curvature of the earth.
It's like, okay, these zero super genius, like whatever. And so that's what I mentioned about like how you can kind of go back and forth. It's like a product copilot is like an all-knowing being. One of our users yesterday submitted feedback to the tool. And it was positive feedback. We were very happy. What they were saying, like, these years, I guess super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD.
So like, you still have to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to oversell this. It's like, you know, it knows everything about everything is like, it's everything perfect. Of course. But it has this sparks of brilliance. Really, truly, I think I've been a big believer that AGI undersells what we're collectively building because we already have all of this as sparks of super intelligence.
I don't believe that these years and AGI, if it knows everything about how to draw a dashed line according to the curvature of the earth and this high-performance map of airplanes, like that's just superhuman. And yeah, it's a joy to use. Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn ads. One of the hardest and also most important parts of V2B marketing is reaching the right people.
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Just go to LinkedIn.com slash pod Lenny. That's LinkedIn.com slash pod Lenny. Terms in conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. As you talk, it's interesting the way I'm thinking about this now. There's almost three core skills in building apps with AI. There's figuring out what to build. There's making it look good, like design. And then there's getting it unstuck. It's interesting how these are going to coaching. Coaching it. Yeah, or just like, here's the database area. I don't know. It's not figuring it out. On the, I guess, does that resonate? I've never thought about it. Absolutely. In fact, I'll tell you a little bit of a story of something that I, even going way back in time, next year I was on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created. Actually, with very similar goals, they had so many cracked engineers and they had to help them collaborate on an enormous product surface.
They invented, or at least pioneered, I would say, the concept of this component as a unit of reusability, as a building blog, as a Lego brick of how you build software. There's no coincidence that LLM's love to work with React components, by the way. And one of the things that always stood out to me about that model is it basically enables people to scale in how they worked together. And one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing is they call it a scape hatch. The API, when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system, they give you a scape hatch. They say, okay, engineer, you're on your own now. There's no guard rails. And in fact, one of this scape hatches is called dangerously set, inner HTML. They wanted the developer to know, untruth territory, but they did give people the API. That is a profound systems design engineering principle.
And throughout my life, I've always thought about scape hatches. One amazing scape hatch that Bezier has is that you're looking at the code that we're generating with NextShast. You can edit it. You can even have other experts look at it. One thing that 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. And they used V0 and Versel extensively to build their application, their websites, et cetera. And the design engineer was talking about how he was on a V0 that had 120 or so iterations. So he was 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 Chattu PTO1. And Chattu PTO1 thought about the solution. I honestly, I'd never even thought about this by some. I was so blown away.
And it doesn't speak to I love your third point of you need to learn to skill how to get unstuck. It's like a profound like life lesson. Like it's just more a generic life advice. You need to get Facebook actually had a principle. Don't get blocked like seek to get unblocked, seek help from other people. What's fascinating is that you can seek help from other AI's to get unstuck. And those escape hatches of like actually understanding and seeing the code underneath and even being able to say, okay, now let's use Git. Let's turn this into a less more of a hybrid project, not just prompts, 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, I'll share a screen and then we'll do a little live demo. Keep it brief. I find people are like, okay, I get it. But we'll make it fun and brief at the same time. There it is. I see it. Beautiful. How? Okay, help you ship. Yeah, of course. We're all about shipping. Okay. So as I mentioned, you write in English, you yap into the tool. I'll say 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. The lives get it. It's self-subreme, the clothing company for an online store. Now, I mentioned that sometimes people get blocked on like, there is like a writer paralysis, a dizzist app. So we added enhanced prompt. So now, like, you're tapping into the late and space of the model, which has a random component to it.
And by the way, this is still not a substitute. It doesn't contradict what I said earlier of you, knowing the meaningful tokens, knowing what, what like the right style is and what it's called and whatever is still highly valuable. So the first thing you're going to notice is that as the model thinks, you can introspect its thinking. So do we add it this recently? And it's been most inspired actually by the deep seek revolution, I would say. So the fact that when you tell it develop a contact sales form, like, what is it going to do? Like, do we talk about scape hatches? Okay, it's going to use shatsy and ui is going to use tell when CSS is going to use react. And this is your opportunity that if these years are not doing exactly what you wanted, this is your opportunity to actually go and sort of correct or influence or give feedback and so on. So you're going to notice it spits out a bunch of files. And it gives me the thing that I wanted, right?
So I'm going to zoom out a little bit here. So a couple of things that stand out here that, I mean, as a, again, as an experienced engineer, I can point out, the underlying component system that it uses is the same component system that the best tools on the plan are built with. This is called shatsy and if you go to groc.com today, they're using shatsy and to build their UI, they're using next shares, you're getting that caliber of code. The other thing that it did is people on social media talk about this 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 kind of knew what Supreme looked like was kind of cool.
我要稍微放大一下来看这个问题。有几件事让我特别注意到,作为一名经验丰富的工程师,我可以指出,这个系统使用的底层组件系统与市场上最好的工具所使用的组件系统是一样的。这个系统叫做 Shatsy,如果你今天访问 groc.com,他们也在使用 Shatsy 来构建他们的用户界面,他们使用的是 next shares,你得到的代码质量是相当高的。
另一件被广泛讨论的事情是,在社交媒体上,人们经常谈论这个话题。当使用一个全球共享的组件系统时,不希望所有东西看起来都一样。因此,他能够应用特定的风格,并确切了解 Supreme 的外观,这一点还挺酷的。
But now I'm going to say actually because I'm building a financial institution, make it more serious, make it in the style of, let's say Charles Schwab, change typepaces. So this is the iteration process of like, I'm going to go and give feedback to the model, I'm going to make it try different things. So once that initial generation was already created, now the model is actually acting more as an editor. It's going and making tweaks to what's already been built. And this actually scales to very large projects. You could have started with something much bigger.
So in the meantime, I'm going to show you what Luma Labs created with BZR, which is absolutely phenomenal. I love this last night. It already has 2004. I was telling you about the power of our community. So by the way, you can just click community here on the BZR sidebar. I'm going to fork it because they generously shared it with the world. Notice all the incredible animations here. By the way, they shipped this to higher and attract talent to their company. I recommend them. By the way, like you should, if you're a brand designer, 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. These are all AI generated as well. And it's interactive. So like there is the auto-playing functionality. This is actually a complex layout in animation system that they built entirely in VZR. I was telling you that at one point, they even got some advice from O1. So shout out to OpenAI. I'm going to say make it sepia style colors.
So this is an example of like, okay, I fork something. I already have a starting point. My bank grade content form is ready in the meantime. Another fun thing to do is you can start with a screenshot. So I'll use another next.js user as an example, which is fortune.com. Shout out to them. They built a slick website. But let's say that I'm actually wanting to break into the news business. So I'm just going to paste a screenshot. I could have also attached a Figma file.
And I'm going to have VZR already knows. VZR can answer questions as well about the engineering design product world. So like I can ask VZR what is a newsletter explain with a diagram. Use Lenny as an example. So VZR is also a knowledge-seeking tool. But we do strongly sort of like, quote unquote steer the tool to create things. So if I paste a screenshot, as you can see, it's cooking on creating a hopefully awesome news website. I specifically ask because I think it's funny to explain a newsletter with a diagram.
VZR can create again like explanations content knowledge. The creator is Lenny. You were a former Airbnb product lead. I guess I should have used some examples from Airbnb by the way. But let's look at here at what it created with fortune. So notice that I'm just noticing now the the cyber should have been on the center. Let's use the zoom out a little bit. Let's use the refinement tool to center this. I called this by the way one of the hardest problems in computer sites. This is actually centering things.
So that's right. 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 the difference between VZR and a lot of other tools is that yes, you do have the code and code is very important. But I call it code last rather than code first. You're living in the product. So is centered that another website that I love also built with next.js is semaphore. So I really like their sepia style. So I'm going to say use this apply this style instead. Include your. So you're sharing a screen. So you used a screenshot to design to build the site. It has a different screenshot to tell it will make it look like this. Yes. And so the idea is that the zero can grow different aspects of what needs to build. It can be functional aspects. It can be layout aspects.
One 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, it's going to like make it work quite well in mobile. It's going to give me that hamburger menu. I can now tell it like apply that style to everything. In the meantime, I'll show you this is actually to me very, very impressive. And I don't know why today I'm so fixated in the theme of sepia. But notice that not only did it just the background, I hope people get noticed this. It applied it to the checkboxes. And it applied the CSS. I'm assuming this is CSS filter. Yeah, it applied a CSS filter just for the sake of it because I'm a nerd. I'm going to look at it.
But yes, it applied a CSS filter. Confession time. I actually didn't know that there was a sepia function in the filter property of CSS. There were many ways to accomplish this. You could have also read the images or the videos to a canvas and like apply all kinds of algorithms and whatever. I like that it did more elegantly than you would have. Exactly. So that's why you can't be too opinionated with the tool. So another cool thing is I do like showing screenshots. 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 good demo. It's a simple way to show off what it can do. Exactly. Like take screenshots of your own things. Right? Take screenshots of your artboards.
Take screenshots of things that people both post in Slack and also don't hesitate to add functionality. Incredible. Thank you for doing the demo. 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 they would be. Like make it sepia. But just how much time would take from okay do this thing. Copyfortions.com it would be like days weeks. Here it's just months. Check it out here. Months. If ever. Never ships. That's right. Well something that I noticed that I loved at the beginning when you were doing the prompting and that prompt improvement feature is it basically is like best practices to make it look good and look better.
Which I think is one of the more interesting 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 helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea. Like what is the problem you're trying to solve? Like it feels like there's a like a PM1 page or step that should exist. Like how do you know this is a problem? What 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 we're more and more peaking into the mind of the AI that in itself is becoming a killer feature.
So the deep seek is stream the thinking tokens moment 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 and open intended. They were going to withhold it and also it wasn't clear that there was going to be product and user and product utility. But when deep seek hit it was very obvious that people really liked the idea of understanding how the AI thinks and influencing where it should go. We've got an 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 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 sort of founder was create a lot of opportunities for people to give you feedback inside the product. I drew inspiration from Stripe and this was amazing for the early days of our cell. There was a feedback button with a very slick inline form with four emojis that would allow you to decide how you were feeling about the 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 user's thoughts right into our consciousness. And maybe we would get I don't know like 10s, hundreds a day, especially in the early days maybe like a couple a day and whatever.
When you're building AI products 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 going to be harder to compete with something that has such a tight feedback loop with users. It's the whole idea is to capture users feedback so the next iteration of the model that prompt the fine tuning the examples the rag is better. And one of the things that a person has done as a result of this insight is with open source a lot of what makes D0 work. So let's say that you wanted to create the D0 for doctors as an example. You can go to versel.com.sash templates and you can clone a chat GPT template that basically follows all of the best practices in the world for like really high performance awesome you eyes.
And now you can go out and build your own AI products. We've also open sourced the aISDK which is the foundational plumbing of D0. It allows you to connect any model and generate UI from its responses. Not just output text but actually generate UI. So maybe because I love showing stuff I'll just really quickly show you this is a kind of excited about it. So if you go to chat that versel.com AI super quick you're going to see this is the open source chat GPT demo that we've built. It can you can ask questions like old school LLM but also you can ask let's actually finish this. Let's ask what is the weather in San Francisco? We call this Generated UI. It's responding not with just plain text is creating components as a result.
现在,你可以出去开发自己的人工智能产品了。我们也开源了aISDK,这是D0的基础框架。它可以连接任何模型并根据其响应生成用户界面。不仅仅是输出文本,而是实际生成用户界面。也许因为我喜欢展示东西,我会非常快速地给你看看这个,这真让我感到兴奋。如果你访问chat.versel.com AI super quick,你会看到这是我们构建的开源ChatGPT演示。你可以像传统的大语言模型那样提问,但也可以更进一步。比如问“旧金山的天气怎么样?”,这时我们称之为“生成UI”。它不仅仅用普通文本回答,而是创建组件作为回应。
Last but not least and this is a sort of easier style opportunity. Let's ask you to help me write an essay about Silicon Valley. It's going to create a canvas or artifacts style experience. And everything is generative but also users can edit refine etc etc etc. This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking about. There's all these startups that are building vertical AI tools this guy like a little bit of a tangent and there's always this like AI stuff for lawyers AI stuff for doctors nurses and the pitch there is that these are going to be founders that know a lot about the specific problem in this total market and so they'll build like the tools that are very specific to them.
Yeah I'm absolutely convinced that expert AI tools are the future. There's an amazing product being built on versel called chatprd.com. It's the VZero for writing PRDs and it's going to get a VZero integration soon so you can write your PRD with AI and then you can deploy to create it with AI. That's just an example of like a vertical that you can go after. There's also open evidence. It's like the chatprd for doctors actually. There is an amazing startup building x-ray AI tooling. So the ideas I think are infinite and what I've seen from users of AI at versel like for example our legal team loves this tool called getgc.ai.
They could in theory go to chatprd to ask legal questions but someone out there decided I'm going to build the best legal AI tool in the world. It's going to be up to date. I'm going to obsess about this problem. The CEO herself is a lawyer so it's going to 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 because it's a complete tangent. No, no, I love it. So you showed me this the weather widget that you just built. Basically it's like a little mini app that AI built as you're talking to it.
Is there a world where when AI when AGI is far enough and approaching super intelligence can it just build you well, hardly for example in real time. Here's the best 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 GCE is taking a 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 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. I don't know this is the this is the double edge sort of like prompt and bellishment like AI doesn't always know exactly what we want or what we need.
It's still very much a copilot, a partner and assistant is not really running our lives and I don't know that we even would want that ultimately. Okay, I'm going to go in a whole different direction which is taste. We hear this we're taste all the time. It feels like the 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 find valuable and good. And I know I feel clearly you have great taste. You're building incredibly beautiful products. These heroes clearly it's like the most beautiful by default builder out there as we've seen.
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 do you build taste? How do you think that 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 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 it's about exposure at Versailles. 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. 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 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 principles of it. But there's also trends in the world, right? Like I'm not a super like couture guy, but like you can see that like every year, like Paris Fashion Week has like a theme to it. And like there is some innovations that have some breakthroughs, whatever. And so trying to stay at a different tier or even trying to define different tier as well is certainly very exciting.
I love how doable this is increasing your exposure hours. Basically what I'm hearing is use the best apps. Yes, there's like a feedback cycle component to it. Just like show and there's send this nuances, right? So I actually recently created that I published it to my community of Proheon V0. I created a chat GPT style interface inspired by GROC. And I captured a few things that GROC does that are just so smart.
So on mobile web, 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 a desktop computer. You can tap the little icon and like your message goes out 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 it slows everything down.
You can basically prompt for those things, right? But you have to pay attention to the details and you have to decide what you want to see in the world. Sometimes that means either defining best practices or seeking the best practices and learning from others. Another aspect of exposure hours is that you tend to overrate 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 search yourself in the real deal, nitty-gritty of what happens when people use your interfaces and what not, I think you'll come out stronger, more grounded, hopefully more humbled. We don't like pain though. This is a push. Create some more pain in your life. Show people the things you're building. Do you have a QRistic or a number of how many exposure hours per week per month you want your team to have or is it just more as always better?
Yeah, more is always better. I mean, because a inertia is to get inside your head and the inertia is to think everything and assume that everything is going good and there are no errors. Of course, it's fast. It worked on my machine. It's always a push for more. I do sometimes little things. I ask my team to color my calendar. I have to have a certain amount of one-on-ones with my team, in a represent of my calendar. Kind of like meetings so that I can sync with people and see how the company is doing. Then I want to have customer meetings. During those customer meetings, I push myself to use the products. In fact, with our enterprise customers, something that I do is I try to forget how things are built, what feature of next year's or virtually using, whatever. I just frequently use their products. I want the product to be great. That's all. Then I try to work backwards. A form of exposure hours for me is seeing what kind of success our customers are having in the real world. Again, it's just eheuristic.
Maybe one-third of my meetings this week were customer meetings. I try and watch them do. Another really quick one is we invite people frequently to demo how they use their product at live. Sometimes through the executive team, sometimes through the whole company. We always inevitably discover something interesting from the customer about maybe there is something that they're in pain about that we didn't know about or maybe something was not as intuitive as we thought. 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. You always like, why have I not done this off more often? Why am I? What am I thinking? It's just so mind blowing usually. I want to talk about limitations of VZR at this point. What should people know about what VZR can do? If you have an existing codebase, can you plug it in and start doing stuff? What else should people know?
It's not going to do this yet. You can import codebase through zip files and get it's coming very soon. It can do full-sac development, it can connect to APIs. In the next couple days, maybe before this podcast is out, we'll have this very tight integrations so that if you need a database or if you need an AI model or if the AI decides, it needs that. It'll just seamlessly install it from the VZR marketplace. The VZR market base has already curated some of the best infrastructure products in the world to store data, to search data, etc. It's going to make the product even more powerful. I'll say, again, I kind of did that exercise. I do that exercise every day of like, I have a wild idea and try to see if it can come to life. It's very powerful so far.
AI's are still very much a work in progress. They can make mistakes. We have it as a little disclaimer underneath the input. You will find errors, our fitness function and we've seen such a stronger relation between user love and retention. These are actually their retentive products compared to other AI products that I've built in the past or little demos that we've done or whatever. People subscribe and use it every single day and are very sort of like, if they notice a bug, they're like very, very like, generally about it because they're depending on a day in and day out. But I'll say, errors are so 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 is so that V0 is very agentic. It has a lot of agency in Hado act.
So you're going to see very frequently that if it runs into errors, these are the crises solve them itself. And then last, I will say, when products get really big, AI today is just not as good at dealing with massive code bases. 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 NextShas was sort of known for is that in order to sort of project, you just create a file and NextShas were route to that page. If anyone is familiar with PHP, it's kind of like how PHP worked. And so it's so good that LLAMs are good at working with files now, because it fits very naturally into our world. 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 a specific file, you decrease that likelihood of the LLM not being able to reason over or very, very, very long context windows.
I want to go back to design. We talked about how VZera is really good at just great design by default. It's a kind of lean into that more if someone wants to 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. They just tips and breast practices for making their app even better. Look at you nicer. Yeah, it was really interesting. At the other day, I met with a CIO who of a large bank who on the side does a lot of coding or like tries out new technologies and whatnot. And I showed him VZera and he immediately became a VZero addict. And he texted me every day with feedback. He moved two websites of his own from another like sort of website builder type provider to VZero and Versel, deploy them, give them a domain name, their live in production.
And then he said, look, I have this challenge. I have this music festival that I organize with a couple of friends. And this is what the designer gave us. And he had this kind of like brochure. It looked very much like a print style design. And so he gave that to VZero and the first result he was kind of like digging me for. He's like, look, this isn't look good. And then because I have experience with the tool, I said like, what are you just giving the feedback? Like little age, you know, you were asking yesterday, like earlier, some of the things that I've learned with the product in now or the best practice, what would I recommend if I were sitting next to someone? Not only you should not hesitate to give the AI feedback, it's so interesting, dude.
Like sometimes people will press a feedback button to tell us what they wanted VZero to do. And literally all we had to do in many cases is, it just can you just tell VZero 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, I don't know what I said is specifically better. Make it more jazzy. Make it more, make it pop. Make it. And so trying and again, it goes back to like, try to draw inspiration from variety that the AI already knows about. So in a couple of problems, we ended up something that was in his mind better than the original print design of that brochure that concert lineup.
有时候,人们会按下反馈按钮,告诉我们他们希望 VZero 做些什么。而实际上,很多情况下,我们只需要让他们直接告诉 VZero 这些需求即可。比如,有个人发信息给我说,他不喜欢设计。我给他回了一个提示语,我会这样回他:“我不知道具体哪里更好。让它更有活力一些,让它更醒目,让它更出彩。”这就像是在尝试并不断回到从 AI 已知的信息中汲取灵感一样。通过在一些问题上的尝试,最终我们得到了一个他认为比原来的乐队节目单设计更好的结果。
At that time, again, I'm even learning about what VZero is capable of and the best way to use it. But with design, I think unleashing its creativity and seeing things and playing with it is definitely super helpful. So one thing I'm hearing here is just tell it, make this look better. Make it pop. Make it pop. You can't totally. But and if you can use tokens that are relevant, so neo-brutalist, minimalist, newspaper like vintage, make it look like a telegram. You can sort of like try and reach for things that you maybe would not naturally come to mind and you will be surprised about how well I can transfer those ideas into reality. Incredible.
It's too easy. Maybe to close that conversation, we'll see where this topic goes. I have this tweet that I loved that I super resonate with. The secrets of product quality is blood, sweat, and tears. I completely agree. I think that's why I think my newsletter has been successful. I spend so much time on every newsletter post more than I think anyone spends on these other posts like 10, 20, 30 hours. That's why I think it works. Is there anything more behind that tweet? Anything you've learned just the importance of working hard? I guess. That's a great, great stuff. Yeah. I mentioned I suppose you're always a good example of like, Loki can be painful.
It can be painful to see your baby break in front of everyone and noticing all the other thing is that a great product is made up of a thousand little details. 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 knows for every yes. Because when you say yes, it's like adopting a puppy. A feature is like adopting a puppy. It grows into a beast that you have to take care of and it's very demanding and loving. But also, it's a lot and poops everywhere. So you have to have a creative restraints. While you also have to have a give, you have to withhold sometimes with the respect of the real world complexity that emerges.
A little thing that I kind of obsess 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 the mobile web site is phenomenal. And to get it to be that good, by the way, it's possible. It's actually possible to get make great things on mobile web. But it needs that sense of love and restraint and obsession and testing a lot and using your own products a lot. Dark food is a great mechanism, obviously. So we use the heck out of Versaille NV-0 to make Versaille NV-0. And hopefully that helps us do better. But there is a lot of blood, so it enters the process. Yeah, you can tell how much you use the product. It comes through and everything you say.
Let me actually ask about this. You talked about how you said you have 600 engineers? No, 600 people total. 600 people total. How was AI changing the way they work? Is there anything there? Because I feel like you guys are at the cutting edge of how products are built. What's happening? Is it just everyone's on Versaille NV-0 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 AI principles in mind. I actually give a shout out to the Luma Labs engineer who said, well, I'll use AI for everything.
I'll use AI also to generate the images for the website. 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 our marketing team, our creating demos of how the infrastructure works with V0 that are better than any static diagram or landing page that I've ever seen. One of my most viral zits or ex-posts is something that one of our designers created, which explains how our computer infrastructure works with an interactive demo. Until he created that, by the way, he designed it and created it and we shipped it all in the tool.
First of all, it wasn't part of his day-to-day job to do that. He, these years making you such a powerful generalist that you can step out of your conference zone of like, well, my job was to do only this. You just create. We have a ritual every Friday we had at this morning called Demo Fridays. It's very important to create the space for people to step out of that conference zone and use AI. So us giving permission to be able to build and ship things is part of that cultural backdrop that makes this thing possible. We had a demo today as part of Demo Friday of our VP of Sales Engineering, also creating an amazing tool that he's going to use to help prospects understand V0 with V0.
So I've heard from DevOps and infrastructure engineers how much they use tools like cursor to work on the low levels of the versatile infrastructure. So I think very quickly we're seeing AI being embedded everywhere. I just heard a product request from a customer and said, I was saying, okay, V0, you sell domain names. Let me come up with new domain ideas with AI. So I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. I do look forward to it because we need to stop talking about AI at some point. It's probably not going to happen, but it is useful to remind people that AI equals software now. And we are a software company. We build software and we use software to build software.
So, NAI is just a part of that. Yeah. Guillermo, what a beautiful way to end it. Is there anything else you wanted to mention? Anything else that you want to leave listeners with before I let you go? I'll leave you with my vision of the future, which is we have this billboard in San Francisco, which is everybody can cook. It's also part of the Rata 2E film, one of my favorite movies. 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 that we are collectively making the world better.
So, anything you experience hopefully gets faster, higher quality, fewer bugs as we go along. And I think we're all contributing to that. And I look forward to that and look forward to everyone's feedback on how Versel can play a part in that future. So, to build on that, we're can folks find you online, we're going to, they should go to Versel.com is it VZero.com. Yeah, and go to VZero.dev to get started. I did mention that if you want to build your own VZero, this is more advanced, but check out our templates on Versel.com and such templates. And also I'm Brouch G on X.
So, you can DM me or tweet at me at any time. Amazing. Garema, thank you so much for being here. Thank you Lanny, it was so fun. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
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