Opinion
Ubl: Anthropic's Boris Power Vibe-Codes From a Position of Privilege
“I think he comes from a particular position of extreme unusual privilege, which is that he works at an AI lab where like people in the office next door are like writing the evals and are like training the model like every day in exactly that way.”
Insight
Malte Ubl: When Vibes and Eval Data Disagree, Vibes Are Right
“I think that the common quip that if the vibes and the data disagree, the vibes are probably right. It's true, right? So you have to like, be honest with yourself, like, do they agree and kind of iterate On them over time.”
Disclosure
Ubl: Vercel's Composite Models Are Faster Than Agentic Loops
“Basically what we do is we have this like composite model architecture. We run the frontier model and then we run the fine tune model after to fix its errors. That doesn't perform better than an agentic loop, but it's orders of magnitude faster, right?”
Opinion
Ubl: Vercel leads the truly open-source deployment business model
“Vercel maybe has not invented this, but certainly kind of is the most successful at a model where you say, okay, I have this software library and it's truly open source. Everyone can run it. It comes with like adapters for every place on the planet, and that m…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Future app platforms must extract auth and authorization completely
“Auth cannot be part of the app, because they're not going to get that right, right? So, Auth has to be extracted from the app. In fact, which data you can see, they also cannot be under control of the app, because again, you're going to get it wrong, right? So…”
Disclosure
Ubl: Vercel publishes evals to influence OpenAI and Anthropic models
“I'm Vercel and I publish at Eval. That I want OpenAI and Anthropic to use to make sure when they ship the next model that they're better at the stuff that I care about.”
Insight
Thick abstractions in nascent AI frameworks are usually wrong
“And so if you put a very thick abstraction, then it's probably going to be the wrong abstraction. You have to, so you have to be humble and say, okay, I need to stay low level. So that this can be flexibly used as trends emerge, right?”
Opinion
Frontier AI model labs ignore application-level integration needs
“Like the model apps couldn't care less because they're not really building applications.”
Insight
Framework creators build ivory towers unless they build real applications
“The reality is that framework builders are usually not application builders. And so they built ivory towers that when they're hyper geniuses, or they get lucky, they're happy to be good. But like, but if you want to do this in a reproducible fashion with a hig…”
Insight
Ubl: Evals Function to Tell Developers Overnight Whether a Change Is Good
“The way I think about evals is essentially like, it's the thing that, that can tell me tomorrow whether my change is good. And I can operate without that knowledge, but it's super, super helpful.”
Insight
Ubl: Transaction systems require explicit or ad hoc workflow abstractions
“What's extremely common and essentially every transaction processing system that has ever created is that there either is an explicit abstraction for workflows in it, or someone made one ad hoc, because otherwise the thing just doesn't work.”
Disclosure
Vercel DevOps agent will soon access codebases to open fix PRs
“One thing that we don't do today, but we'll do in the future is that we also give the Model X that particular agent access to your source code so that it can, first of all, figure out like, what does the error message mean? Right. And every time you can actual…”
Insight
AI agents only succeed when scoped to narrow problem domains
“At this moment, they're, like, agents are both extraordinarily effective and still very ineffective. And you have to find the right problems. And then when you find the right problems, they are super magical. And if you wander beyond, then they don't work.”
Insight
Asking employees what they hate identifies high-impact AI agent tasks
“Basically where the idea is that you go around your company and you ask people like, what do you hate most about your job? And I really think it finds the sweet spot because it finds problems that are, they're boring because they're tedious and repetitive, but…”
Disclosure
Vercel enterprise contracts require clients to build three AI agents
“We basically sign contracts with companies saying, okay, you have to commit to building three agents, and if you do, we're going to help you, like, we're going to build the first one for you. And then the second one, we are going to be there essentially by you…”
Disclosure
Vercel will eventually support PHP and Ruby runtimes
“We will eventually do PHP and Ruby, but we also, I think, care a lot about the details, and so the Essentially the reason why we haven't done it yet is because we do invest substantial amount of time to make the DX actually good and feel native to the ecosyste…”
Insight
AI product pivots must naturally extend a company's core identity
“And I think there's a lesson there to be learned for companies that haven't done the transition yet. Is that you have to do something that feels native to your company. And so the two big bets that we made early on, one being vZero and one being AISDK, I think…”
Assertion Contradicted
Ubl: Cognition and Cursor shipped RL fine-tunes of open-source models
“Just yesterday, I think we saw both Cognition, congrats, SWIX, and Cursor to ship RL fine tunes of unnamed open source models.”
Assertion Supported
Vercel paused workflows incur zero compute cost indefinitely
“No, it literally does not cost anything. So yeah, you can run compute for infinite amount of time. You can then also, whenever, like, one of these steps fails, automatically retry them.”
Assertion Supported
Vercel AI SDK v6 stabilizes direct agent abstractions
“What it does introduce as a stable feature, because it's already as kind of experimental in, in AISDK five is a direct agent abstraction, which so far wasn't there, right? People would build agents with AISDK, but they would have to do it in Whitmore Baybones …”
Disclosure
Vercel never releases developer abstractions without internal dogfooding
“The absolute founding principle of a cell is that we never give you an abstraction that we haven't used ourselves. Like dog footing is ultimately the thing, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Vercel AI SDK was extracted from v0 before re-integrating it
“Like that, like AISDK was extracted from B-Zero and then we build it and we kind of diverged a little bit and then we took on the substantial work to bring back VZero actually fully hosted on ISDK”
Disclosure
Vercel shipped zero-config deployment for Flask and FastAPI
“What we have done over the last weeks is we have shipped like zero config support on Vercel for all the popular Python framework like Flask and FastAPI.”
