The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rauch: Nearly 70% of Vercel documentation traffic comes from coding agents
“Nearly 70% of traffic To Vercel docs is now coming from coding agents. 70% and only 30% of page views are coming from humans.”
Rauch: Major AI labs view coding agents as most promising AGI path
“You know, I've spoken with a bunch of people about this at every other lab and they themselves have been surprised that a coding agent was, is the most promising path to AGI.”
Rauch: AI agents will soon independently sign up and pay for services
“I fully expect agents to be signing up for services directly, zero human intervention soon, making payments on behalf of people imminently, you know, getting credit cards and budgets and solving entire problems for people where the service provider becomes an,…”
Rauch: The SaaS business model will be disrupted by AI agents
“The SAS business model definitely gets disrupted because it was predicated on selling seats.”
Rauch: AI model providers cannot sustain flat subscription pricing
“By the way, one prediction that I, that I'll make is that it's going to continue to get more and more complicated for them to sustain the subscription thing, because it's almost an impossible problem.”
Rauch: Generating software will win over searching for and procuring software
“Generating software, it was in competition now with Googling for software, but now generating software is not just in competition, it's going to win. It means that everyone can produce their own software for personal use or for enterprise use, because why woul…”
Rauch: Giving AI agents full computer access produces an AGI-like experience
“The very fascinating thing about agents is the more power an agent has, the more intelligently it performs. And so if an agent has an entire computer, like a Mac mini, it, you feel like you have AGI in your hands.”
Rauch: OpenClaw has similar potential to Linux to become ubiquitous infrastructure
“But this is a good problem to have because when, ah, I really think that, you know, OpenClaw is like Linux. And I agree with Jensen Huang that when Linus Torvalds introduced Linux on the mailing list, he said, I have this toy kernel. Totally not for production…”
Rauch: Vercel candidates must explain how they would automate their own roles
“And so basically everyone at Vercel is now kind of like the steward of the agent, and that's their new job expectation. And now it's become part of our job screening, which actually forces the hiring manager to think about, I'm hiring a roboticist. I'm not hir…”
Rauch: Vercel rerouted Dubai region after two AWS availability zones were droned
“Our region in Dubai got taken offline because of war. You know, two of our availability zones hosted by AWS were droned. So we had to reroute an entire region”
Rauch: Cloud infrastructure will increasingly become a physical target in conflicts
“I think we're going to continue to see how our cloud infrastructure becomes a target because the most valuable thing will be the computers being online and doing number crunching and processing and disseminating intelligence.”
Rauch: Traffic for generic factual content will stay inside AI front ends
“It used to be a valid content marketing strategy and like marketers in the values to do this, like create a lot of content so that when people search, you'll hit the keywords and whatever, but increasingly a lot of that traffic will just stay in the AI front e…”
Rauch: Generating software is AI's killer application
“Generating software is actually the killer app of AI.”
Rauch: AI will expand React developers from four to fifty million
“There's four million React developers. I can move that from four million to fifty million trivially, because now like you just speak English to that thing. Even if like it doesn't do a hundred percent of the job, it's just like this like infinitely available a…”
Rauch: AI search tools will absorb traffic for factual content marketing
“And so if what you're producing is content that is sort of like facts in general knowledge, it's very likely that you're never, you're not even going to get back the backlinks. Cause someone's going to search on Google, for example, what is HTTP? It used to be…”
Rauch: Natural language AI will trivially grow React developers to 50M
“Like there's four million react developers. I can move that from four million to fifty million trivially, because now like you just speak English to that thing. Even if like it doesn't do a hundred percent of the job, it's just like this, like infinitely avail…”
Rauch: Much of AI output is horrible slop driven by hype
“We do have to hold AI to an insanely high bar because there's way too much spending and way too much hype, and a lot of it is the slop. It's just like, a lot of it looks horrible.”
Rauch: Customers Who Build on Vercel Never Need Cloudflare
“With Cloudflare, it's more like the meme of like, I don't think about you, because when customers build on Vercel, they never end up needing Cloudflare, but they're coming to us to build software, not to sort of like proxy it or whatnot.”
Rauch: Coding agents are the necessary foundation for general-purpose AI agents
“Turned out that a coding agent was a necessary DNA for full personal agents and general purpose agents to grow first.”
Rauch: Vercel Signups Are Growing 50% Month Over Month
“Our signups are growing by 50% month over month.”
Rauch: Anthropic long refused to support agents.md, requiring claude.md files
“For example, I don't know if they've adapted yet, but Anthropic for a long time was not playing ball with agents.md. You could only call their instructions claude.md.”
Rauch: Vercel aims to become the AWS of agentic infrastructure
“So that's the focus of the company right now build being the AWS of agentic infrastructure.”
Rauch: Being technical now means using AI tools effectively
“The new technical is that you used AI tools so well that what people used to take pride in being technical on is now an implementation detail that is less important.”
Rauch: Bewildering agent demand will spark battles over CPU and GPU allocation
“One thing I also predict is that the stress on infrastructure is going to be bewildering. Who gets allocation of hardware is going to become a big battle. Again, it's not just GPUs, by the way, it's also CPUs. Who gets access to raw metal to satisfy the endles…”
Rauch: Copilot gave Microsoft conviction in OpenAI after broader bets
“I was interviewing Nat Freeman today for our internal Vercel podcast today, and he was talking about how much conviction Microsoft got into OpenAI because of the effectiveness of Copilot. Like when Satya saw Copilot, when they were doing the initial iterations…”
Rauch: Crypto apps should treat decentralized infrastructure as an invisible implementation detail
“What I saw in Polymarket and starting to see in a lot of other companies is give value to the customer and use decentralized infrastructure under the hood, but don't lead with the decentralized infrastructure. That's just an implementation detail.”
Rauch: AWS and Azure require weeks and experts for basic setup
“If you use the, like, foundational cloud infrastructure today, like AWS or Azure, it's really, really difficult to turn your idea into reality. It'll take you on team of experts, and it'll take you weeks just to set up the foundations.”
Rauch: Vercel mitigated a 150,000-IP botnet attack on prediction markets
“The largest attack that we saw, which we estimate was actually probably targeting some of our customers in the sort of like prediction market space for reasons that I can't fully share, but the attack was pretty sizable, a 150,000 APs, a globally distributed b…”
Rauch: 2024 election saw less AI fake content than anticipated
“I think we saw less of the AI will be used for, like, fake content to some extent.”
Rauch: Generating software is the killer application of AI
“Generating software is actually the killer app of AI.”
Rauch: Crypto apps succeed when decentralized infrastructure is hidden under the hood
“What I saw in Polymarket and starting to see in a lot of other companies is give value to the customer and use decentralized infrastructure under the hood, but don't lead with the decentralized infrastructure. That's just an implementation detail.”
Rauch: Vercel routes customer data queries through an internal AI agent
“In the past, Questions about customers would happen through, maybe there is a Salesforce account open, and the data team, the data integration, and if it's a very complex question, I have to ask a data analyst. All of that is going through an agent now.”
Rauch: Data analyst agents must push back and correct company terminology
“One of the things about a data analyst agent is that it should correct you in your terminology. If a Brit comes into Vercel and says, tell me how many weekly active users we have. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. At Vercel, we have weekly active developers …”
Rauch: Vercel Uses a 'Zero AI' Interview to Test Raw Candidate Abilities
“And for that, we actually do a zero AI interview and I basically need a platform for the zero AI interview with clearly detection.”
Rauch: Selling domain names is a terrible business
“We sell domain names, which is actually a terrible business, but we understand the psychology of creators, which is that again, our goal is to go from zero to one as fast as possible with the least amount of latency.”
Rauch: Platform algorithms limit speech, making independent domain ownership essential
“There's this question of like freedom of speech and X that's censored versus not censored and whatever. There's a question of the algorithms, right? Which I think is a meta question. Sir, you can post anything, but will the algorithm select you such that you'r…”
Rauch: Content bypassing AI filters will be experiential and opinion-driven
“When you have content that kind of like bypasses the great AI filter, and most of that I think is going to be experiential, like personal it's probably going to amplify a lot of hot takes and like things that the for you algorithm likes in general, which is li…”
Rauch: Google estimates there are four million React engineers globally
“For what we do, which is react, which is like the front end. There's four million is the best estimate we get from Google and for creating interfaces, which is very much like a design thing.”
Rauch: AI will become embedded everywhere until we stop incessantly discussing it
“I do believe that there will be AI embedded into everything to the point where we stop referring to it incessantly. And I think one of those points, one of those places will be the operating system.”
Guillermo Rauch: Focusing angel investments on AI agent risk mitigation
“I've been particularly interested in everything around risk mitigation for agents, obviously, for obvious reasons.”
Rauch: Vercel hired a 17-year-old whose offer was signed by his mother
“Today, we gave an offer or we finalized an the offer got signed by a mother. Why? Because we hire someone that's 17 years old, that we went through the trouble of, like, doing it lawfully, obviously, and having his parents approve, because this person is so ov…”
Rauch: Google estimates there are four million React developers globally
“For what we do, which is React, which is like the front end, there's four million is the best estimate we get from Google.”
Rauch: Vercel Hosted Polymarket and Washington Post During 2024 Election
“In fact, in terms of the election, we hosted the election microsites for Washington post. We hosted polymarket.com, which was extremely hot this election, like quite literally hot in terms of like, How many servers, how much infrastructure it took to help them…”