Vercel

⚡️ Why you should build Science Fiction — Sunil Pai, Cloudflare

May 24, 2026 · 14:47

Sunil Pai (Cloudflare) argues that Cloudflare's Durable Objects and Dynamic Workers offer a more efficient architecture for AI agents than Anthropic's cloud-managed agents by providing stateful serverless computing and safe execution of LLM-generated code. He explains that Durable Objects enable millions of stateful serverless actors, while Dynamic Workers allow running user- or LLM-generated code in a zero-startup-time sandbox with controlled API exposure. Pai notes that no one has yet built the 'React' for agent harnesses, and the industry needs a standardized cross-platform abstraction. He recounts a personal 'slop fork' incident where his fork of Vercel’s Just Bash was misinterpreted as a Cloudflare move, highlighting the importance of candor in a tight-knit industry. He observes that open source repos have become adversarial grounds, with fake security reports being a top attack vector. Pai concludes by encouraging developers to build original 'sci-fi' projects instead of incremental improvements or chasing enterprise deals.

Senior Dev: This "Grill Me" Prompt Is Going Viral Among Top Engineers

May 7, 2026 · 22:03

Matt Pocock — the TypeScript educator turned AI engineering teacher who created the viral "Grill Me" prompt and runs AI Hero — argues that classic software engineering fundamentals are more critical than ever in the AI coding era. He explains how Domain-Driven Design's ubiquitous language and deep module patterns let developers contain complexity and delegate implementation to AI. His free "Grill Me" skill (part of his 13,000-star skills repo) forces AI to relentlessly interview humans until reaching shared understanding. He contrasts Claude Code's ease-of-use against Pie's transparent primitives, predicting a shift toward developer observability. The episode also covers his two-month course creation process, why TypeScript is overtaking Python in AI engineering, and why traditional lectures still dominate learning.

⚡️ Competing with ChatGPT and Sierra, building a $10M ARR company — Yasser Elsaid, Founder, Chatbase

May 2, 2026 · 1:00:26

Yasser Elsaid, founder of bootstrapped AI chatbot company Chatbase, discusses how he grew from a side project to $10M ARR in three years, reaching $1M in just 117 days. He explains why he never raised VC, relying instead on product-led growth, self-serve signups, and a content-driven go-to-market strategy. Elsaid shares specific tactics like warm outbound to signed-up users, leveraging LinkedIn virality in early AI days, and now moving toward outcome-based pricing for enterprise customers. He details Chatbase's evolution from a simple RAG chatbot into a 'chief customer officer' that handles support, sales, and onboarding while surfacing business insights from conversations. The episode also covers his transition from Toronto to San Francisco, his hiring philosophy favoring results-oriented engineers, and his daily use of both Claude Code and Codex for development.

The Great Evals Debate — Ankur Goyal & Malte Ubl

Dec 7, 2025 · 34:33

Ankur Goyal (Braintrust) and Malte Ubl (Vercel) debate whether offline evals are essential infrastructure or premature optimization for AI coding agents, arguing that the best teams deliberately invest in multiple feedback loops—offline evals, A/B tests, and vibe checks—to build effective AI products. They explain that modern evals are not about manufacturing golden datasets but pulling real user failures from production logs into eval suites to iterate faster. The conversation highlights how evals provide a 'first derivative' that enables aggressive shipping without regression fears, akin to unit tests in traditional software. Coding evals are uniquely verifiable (e.g., 'does it compile?') yet underutilized; Vercel uses them in RL pipelines to fine-tune models that fix trivial errors 100x faster than agentic loops. They also discuss how product managers encode domain expertise through rubrics and LLM-as-judge scoring, and why proprietary evals are competitive moats while public benchmarks serve marketing. The debate concludes that RL environments are a promising frontier for computer-use agents but require specialized expertise to avoid reward hacking.

⚡ Inside GitHub’s AI Revolution: Jared Palmer Reveals Agent HQ & The Future of Coding Agents

Nov 10, 2025 · 35:52

Jared Palmer, SVP at GitHub and VP at CoreAI at Microsoft, traces his journey from building v0 at Vercel—a focused Next.js coding agent that grew from $1M ARR to millions more after adding chat—to launching Agent HQ at GitHub Universe, a collaboration hub for developers and coding agents. He explains how v0's success came from laser-focus on one stack and framework, and how GitHub's 180M developers enable scaling agent-based workflows. Palmer discusses model strategy tradeoffs (composite vs. branded models), the challenge of repo setup and infrastructure reliability, and using coding agents for non-coding tasks like automating Excel workflows. He reveals Stacked Diffs as GitHub's top feature request, with active exploration after previous attempts, and outlines his vision for seamless AI integration across GitHub, VS Code, and Actions, including features like resolving merge conflicts with AI.

⚡️ Ship AI recap: Agents, Workflows, and Python — w/ Vercel CTO Malte Ubl

Nov 1, 2025 · 42:02

Vercel CTO Malte Ubl discusses the company's AI strategy, centered on the new Workflow Development Kit that enables durable, resumable serverless functions with infinite idle time at no cost. He explains how the AI SDK was extracted from v0 and remains deliberately low-level to accommodate emerging patterns, with a direct agent abstraction now stable in version six. Ubl details Vercel's internal agents—including a DevOps agent that investigates production anomalies by querying observability data and logs, solving the recall-precision problem in alerting—and the 'Agent on Every Desk' program that helps large companies build their first three agents. He also covers zero-config Python support for Flask and FastAPI, and a security model that assumes developers cannot be trusted, extracting auth and data access from application code.

The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe

Oct 30, 2025 · 1:37:13

Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe, explains how Stripe builds economic infrastructure for AI, processing 1.4% of global GDP. Stripe's domain-specific foundation model runs inline on the charge path, detecting card-testing attacks on large users with detection rates improving from 59% to 97%. The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI creates a shared standard for businesses to expose products to AI agents, adopted by Walmart and Sam's Club. Stripe helps AI companies combat new fraud vectors like free trial and refund abuse, and launched token billing to let wrappers price based on real-time inference costs. Internally, 85% of Stripes use LLM tools daily, with code generation and merchant understanding as key use cases. Emily argues AI companies grow 2-3x faster than SaaS, are twice as global, and that agentic commerce will expand consumption by removing time constraints for high-income consumers.

Production AI Engineering starts with Evals

Oct 11, 2024 · 1:56:16

Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, argues that evaluation is the core workflow of production AI engineering and shows how his platform makes evals accessible to software engineers. Drawing from his experience at SingleStore and Impira, he details Braintrust's evolution from an eval tool into an end-to-end AI development platform used by Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, and other top AI teams. He shares market data: OpenAI handles over 95% of production workloads, fine-tuning is declining, and open-source models account for under 5% due to reliability issues. Ankur explains why he avoided building a vector database—the real challenge is permissions and joins, not vector search—and predicts o1-style reasoning will replace complex agent frameworks. He reveals Braintrust's differentiators: hybrid on-prem, TypeScript-first SDK, and declarative eval structures.

[Paper Club] Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Judges with Humans (w/ Eugene Yan)

Sep 28, 2024 · 1:00:55

Eugene Yan presents the paper 'Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Judges with Humans' by Shreya Shankar, introducing EvalGen, a framework that helps developers iteratively align LLM evaluators with human labels by grading outputs, refining criteria, and tracking coverage (recall) and false failure rate (1−precision). Yan demonstrates his own prototype 'Label', which forces users to label 20 samples before unlocking evaluation mode and 50 samples plus one evaluation run before optimization, gamifying the alignment loop. The discussion covers binary vs. pairwise evaluation, the subjectivity of criteria, and Shreya Shankar's plans to integrate natural language feedback into EvalGen's next version. Yan advocates that labeling data is essential before deploying LLM evaluators in production, turning the process into prompt fine-tuning rather than vibe checks.