(2025-04-13) Everyones An Engineer Now Inside V0s Mission To Create A Hundred Million Builders

Lenny Rachitsky interviews Guillermo Rauch (founder & CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders.

Lenny Rachitsky:
Today my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, 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 Next.js and Socket.IO.

I was going to ask you how v0 came out of Vercel, and my theory was it was like you guys are sitting around being like, "How do we get more people building websites?" And it's like, "Okay, let's just help them do it really easily." It's like TAM expansion for Vercel. Is that?

In some ways what 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 the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because I took something that was very difficult to do, but very compelling. It was with real-time in the past. It's building cutting-edge applications on the web with Next.js. And I try to make it as easy as possible.

there is maybe five million React developers, which is the the library engine that we use, and there's maybe 20 million JavaScript developers

how many product builders are people with aspirations of building products exist?
My back of the napkin, minimum calculation is a hundred million

concretely, the genesis, 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 Next.js, and again, the power of open source. Our tools were already in the training data of the internet

because the models were so good at writing this kind of code, the idea for v0 came naturally from, "What if we could build a ChatGPT for building web products?"

they're all finding that there is all these kinds 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.

In terms of v0, what's the scale at this point?

I can share that it's growing exponentially, and that over 1.3 million users have interacted with v0 so far

we launched a feature about a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called v0 Community. It already has 20,000 submissions

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 and you put text in it. But there's a little bit of a writer's block 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 a random assortment of community submissions.

You can look at the code and fork it?

It is becoming like a compounding investment. People share something, someone else grabs it, makes it better. Maybe you used it at that point.

In many ways, I see this as the next evolution of GitHub.

as a side effect, we can also produce a Git commit for you. That feature's not online yet, but it's coming in the next couple of days

Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen?

The most profound one that I alluded to is that conversations between product builders and their customers will be mediated by these zero links, these artifacts. (vibe prototyping)

One of the things that people got excited about that we published on the Vercel blog was about design engineering, because a lot of the people that we were noticing were being very successful at Vercel were people that had both the design and engineering skills.
And that was actually another huge motivator and inspiration for v0, because we realized that people could be more full stack.

a designer that can ship a fully-baked product, a product manager that can prototype and shift to production. (Dubious about that last step!)

if you have kids, whether you have kids or not, just say they were trying to decide, "What should I learn to be, to thrive in this future?" Well, how would you summarize it? How far? Should they get into software engineering?

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.

Have you heard a meme of wordcels versus shape rotators?

So a shape rotator is someone that only has a math brain. You could argue the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shape rotators, because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status, respect, net worth, whatever. And then there's the wordcels, which is communicating, more of the liberal arts.

But I think developing great eloquence, and knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about, knowing how to refer to things in that global mental map of symbolic systems will be highly valuable.

prompt enhancement and embellishment cannot replace thinking and cannot replace your own creativity

another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons, which just went to an awesome hackathon at University of San Francisco, USF. It was called the BLOOM Hackathon.
And I took two of my kids and I wanted them to watch how people presented their ideas and we had a lot of fun.

Especially in a world where the marginal cost of producing software and new things are going down, 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. (personal branding)

So are you encouraging to learn to code? Because it's interesting you mentioned...
Yes... learning how to prompt, learning how to code.

And so learning to code in the abstract might be good for some people, but it 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 it 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.

Vercel, maybe as a metaphor is like AWS in easy mode for a lot of people

the language that we choose is actually very relevant in this story.
JavaScript, 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

There's a world where you could argue ChatGPT will build the next version of ChatGPT. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long ways away, if ever.
Absolutely

at Vercel had, we have 150 engineers that can write code and 600 total headcount. Now we have 600 engineers. Some of the best things that I've seen created with v0 have not come from our engineering team.
They've come from the marketing team, they've come from the sales team, they've come from the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, because now they're actually building the product.

The name v0 implies the product is for prototypes for the first attempt at stuff. And that's definitely where all these tools are finding product market fit prototypes, PMs showing a thing working versus just design. Do you expect v0 and other tools to get to a place where you can build salesforce.com and scale it to billions of dollars?
Absolutely.

Number one is you can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what you ask the tool. If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have, you're always going to get better results.

What would a couple tips be?

have some suspension of disbelief

And try to be open-minded about how well the tool can implement it.
Those would be my main wants. You also have to have a sense of iteration.

It's amazing how many times I've gotten unstuck in v0 by just saying, "Just try something else."

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.... Flightradar, there's like 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

integrated into a flight data API called Edge Aviation. So this is what I told v0, "You're going to build the best flight radar on the planet." I wasn't prescriptive at how

once we cooked on the design, which looks, I would say beautiful, I then got more ambitious and I said, "All right, 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

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?"
Yeah, I do say that a lot

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. Okay, plug into the flights' API."

Maybe the most cracked engineer at Vercel could knock it out in ... without using any AI, could knock it out in a couple days. But then what about the design? What about me? Because I'm the bottleneck, not the engineer. And this is what's amazing about this collaboration because I'm providing the product guidance. I'm saying, "Draw a dashed line between the ... " And by the way, v0 just blew my mind so hard. I said, "Draw a dashed line between the two destination airports." And v0 said, "Well, I have to account for the spherical, or what is it, it's a pseudosphere, for the curvature of the earth." It's like, "Okay, v0, super genius, whatever."

the way I'm thinking about this now, there's almost like 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.

And coaching it

Next.js builds on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created

collaborate on an enormous product surface

concept of this component as a unit of reusability, as a building block, as a Lego brick of how you build software. It's no coincidence that LLMs love to work with ReactJs components, by the way.

one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing, is they called it escape hatch.
The API, when when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system, they give you escape hatch. They say, "Okay, engineer. You are on your own now. There's no guardrails." And in fact, one of these escape hatches is called dangerously set inner HTML. They want the developer to know uncharted territory. But they did give people the API. That is a profound systems design engineering principle.

I love that your third point of, "You need to learn a skill of how to get unstuck."
It's like a profound life lesson

What's fascinating is that you can seek help from other AIs to get unstuck.

Let's actually make the super concrete and show people what this actually looks like in v0. So pull up, we'll share screen, and then we'll do a little live demo.

sometimes people get blocked, there is a writer paralysis at this step. So we added enhanced prompt. So now you're tapping into the latent 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, knowing the meaningful tokens

the first thing you're going to notice is that as the model thinks, you can introspect its thinking

this is your opportunity that if v0 is not doing exactly what you wanted, this is your opportunity to actually go and correct, or influence, or give feedback and so on.

The underlying component system that it uses is the same component system that the best tools on the planet are built with. This is called shadcn.

I'm going to show you what Lumalabs created with v0, which is absolutely phenomenal. I learned about this last night. It already has 2,000 forks

I specifically asked, because I think it's funny, to explain a newsletter with a diagram, so v0 can create again, explanations, content, knowledge. The creator is Lenny, you were a former Airbnb product lead

So you're sharing a screen. So you used a screenshot to design, to build a site, and now you're using a different screenshot to tell it, "Make it look like this."

So in a couple of prompts, we ended up something that was in his mind, better than the original print design of that brochure, that concert lineup. And at that time, and again, I'm even learning about what v0 is capable of and the best ways to use it.

The other day I met with a CIO of a large bank who, on the side does a lot of coding

How have you built taste? How do you think you build taste and any advice for folks that are trying to improve their taste?

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

He moved two websites of his own from another website builder type provider to v0

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 nos for every yes.

"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 brochure. It looked very much like a print style design. And so he gave that to v0 and the first result, he was dinging me for it. He's like, "Look, this doesn't look good."

also feels like there's this opportunity of just helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea.
"What is the problem you're trying to solve?" It feels like there's a PM1 pager step that should exist. Like, "How do you know this is a problem? What have users told you? How many people have told you this?" Things like that.

But with design, I think unleashing its creativity, and seeing things, and playing with it is definitely super helpful.

"Why don't I just give it the feedback?"

if someone wants to improve the design of their product, most people are not designers, they don't really know how to make it look good. They don't know what to ask for.
Any just tips and best practices

it's extremely important to try lots of products.

I do that exercise every day of I have a wild idea and try to see if it can come to life.