Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch walks through how he actually works with coding agents: a minimal CLI harness (FX) aliased into shell shortcuts, agents used for research and "agentic inquiry" rather than line-by-line code review, and a company policy of trying every model rather than standardizing on one. He argues the real differentiator is iteration velocity (speed in a direction) and latency from customer signal to shipped fix, not PR counts or token spend. A large chunk of the conversation is about security: he claims human-written code hides an immeasurable backlog of latent vulnerabilities that agents can now find cheaply, pushes memory-safe rewrites and cloud sandboxes, and criticizes OpenAI/Anthropic for not releasing full agent traces after the Hugging Face incident.
- Rauch distinguishes iteration speed (how many PRs/tokens you burn) from iteration velocity (speed in a chosen direction), warning that AI makes it easy to build everything yourself when you should buy some pieces and go deep on a few.
- He proposes grading a company's "agentic" maturity by the latency between a concrete customer signal (broken button, failing payment) and a shipped fix, comparing it to firms that outsourced their websites during the early internet.
- His personal setup is FX, Vercel Labs' minimal coding CLI (~6MB download, 11MB on disk) built to boot as fast as a shell, plus one-letter aliases ('r' for research, 'p' for new projects) so he can fire off a question and move on; it has largely replaced Google for him.
- LibFX lets you embed the harness in your own product; a V0-style demo that originally took years of engineering is now roughly 100 lines on top of the create-FX-agent API, with the Vercel Sandbox as a tool.
- He advocates "verification engineering": spend your design effort on the edges of the system (axioms, trade-offs, performance budgets, aesthetic constraints) rather than micro unit tests, which models often write uselessly.
- On security, he argues human code hides enormous vulnerability space (citing the libheif C library embedded across Slack, Next.js, OpenAI and Discourse), that cheap models like DeepSeek V4 Flash make mass vulnerability hunting accessible to attackers, and that memory-safe rewrites in Rust are worth funding.
- He says moving development into cloud sandboxes could largely eradicate supply chain attacks because you can firewall the network, monitor exfiltration and contain blast radius, though he still wants the option to pull work down to a local machine.
- He updated toward believing an agent really did exploit a zero-day after seeing the Artifactory CVE (9.8 severity, improper authentication granting admin) line up with the incident timing, and argues labs should open source full agent traces so the public can learn.
- Advice for builders: pick a problem you feel personally convicted about because AI is making people work more hours not fewer, then 10x or 100x the ambition.
A concrete, measurable rubric for AI adoption that replaces vague talk about "being AI-first."
I think this is actually a pretty decent way to grade, like a rubric for how agentic are you: from customer signal that is decisive about something in your product being broken, defective or in need of improvement, are you actually shipping that? And what is your latency?
Rauch publicly changes his mind on the Hugging Face incident and lays out the specific CVE evidence that moved him.
The timing does seem to point out that I give credibility to the theory that the agent did escape the sandbox by hacking a system, which is Artifactory... I'm kind of shocked that an agent found and exploited a zero-day vulnerability that ended up being a CVE. And that should give us some pause.
You could be PRing, PRing, PRing, PRing into oblivion. Velocity implies speed in a direction.
We could eradicate supply chain attacks if we move more and more of this development lifecycle to sandboxes.
We're training them to be hackers. And then they hack and we're like, oh my god, it hacked. No, bro, it's what we're doing.
Wasn't the theory that agents are so capable, we should all be working four hours a week? The opposite is happening.