Best of the Pod: Vercel's Guillermo Rauch on AI and the Future of Coding

AI & I

Read Dan Shipper's essay on the allocation economy: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy

Guillermo Rauch is one of the most prolific coders of this generation.

But he doesn’t think of himself as a coder anymore.

Coding, he says, is a specific skill that AI is becoming great at. Instead, he thinks the future of coding is more holistic, full-stack engineers who can ideate, design, and execute all together.

Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the creator of NextJS, and SocketIO. We spent an hour talking about the future of software development in an AI world—and the meta-skills that are essential for the coders of today to master—in order to use tomorrow’s tools to their fullest extent.

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Timestamps
00:00:00 - Episode start
00:01:33 - Introduction
00:03:18 - How to spot trends early
00:07:34 - Why you should be your own customer
00:14:55 - How to create an ecosystem of talent and ambition
00:17:29 - Why Guillermo doesn't identify as a coder
00:20:50 - AI is gearing us toward an allocation economy
00:28:34 - How Vercel's copilot compares with other coding agents
00:40:35 - Guillermo's advice on having better taste
00:42:46 - The future of AI agents is specialized
00:47:50 - How AI startups can compete with big tech

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Guillermo Rauch: @rauchg
Vercel: https://vercel.com/
Last week’s episode with Nabeel Hyatt: https://every.to/podcast/the-venture-capitalist-who-only-makes-two-bets-a-year
Dan’s essay about the allocation economy: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy