Opinion
Rauch: Web architecture is moving from static Jamstack to dynamic rendering
“There's a huge push for dynamic and away from static and sort of the previous buzzword of Jamstack architectures.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rauch: Product engineering will evolve into curating and prompting AI UI
“I think I see a world where the product engineer role evolves to become that. I like this. I don't like this. Okay. Let's refine it. Let's reprompt. Okay. This looks too much like the average website. I don't want it. And of course you can sort of dive more in…”
Insight
Rauch: Copy and paste is always better than a bad abstraction
“There's a great phrase that I love, which is copy and paste is always better than a bad abstraction. And a lot of the worst code bases are the ones that are over abstracted.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rauch: AI could operate in a purer logic layer before compiling to code
“So I definitely believe that AIs could operate in a more pure layer. Of logic that then gets converted and mapped back to whatever problem at hand that you have.”
Insight
Rauch: The frontend is a company's most important asset
“Front end is the most important thing that your company has, because that's where you meet your customer. That's where you can accelerate your website to drive more conversion, more signups, more sales.”
Insight
Rauch: A Lot of AI Value Can Accrue at the Last Mile
“And I'm a big believer that that last mile of integration can be where a lot of the value accrues.”
Insight
Rauch: Startups do not need to train or fine-tune custom AI models
“You know, for entrepreneurs or startups that are listening in, I do believe that you don't have to train or fine tune a new model in order to create a legitimately useful product.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rauch: Early AI frameworks will be replaced by second-generation production tools
“Frameworks that we're seeing, like the more like opinionated frameworks that we're seeing, they're probably going to have to evolve a lot. And I think that we're probably going to see a second generation of frameworks that come out of actually building and dep…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rauch: React, Svelte, and Vue are here to stay as AI tools generate code
“Frameworks like React, Svelte, and Vue, Very clearly seem here to stay, especially React has sort of dominated at the top of the web. So I actually expect to not see a ton of change there and the innovation to switch to like, what are the AI tools that can act…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rauch: The most successful software companies always work in massive monorepos
“And this also comes from the observation that the largest companies, the ones that have written the most successful software on the planet, have always worked in massive monorepos.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rauch: Great AI-Native Companies Will Be Built on Foundation Models as Cloud 2.0
“My new insight is there's going to be a lot of great AI native companies that are built on top of this new infrastructure. Let's call it like cloud two point O, which is this foundation models. These are the new backends that are going to power the most exciti…”
Insight
Rauch: Observability is mandatory from v0.1 for AI applications
“It's like letting you provide a great quality of service, but in the AI realm, it's just so mandatory. Like your V 0.1 already needs that critical feedback loop.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rauch: OpenAI is by far the most popular backend in Vercel telemetry
“OpenAI is by far the most popular backend. Like we have sort of aggregated anonymized telemetry and like, what are the backends that our server functions are talking to and OpenAI is sort of Biggest.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rauch: Every customer deploying AI at scale faces bot and abuse attacks
“On the bot mitigation and abuse prevention thing, every single customer that's deployed AI at scale, At any scale, a product that actually works has already faced this challenge.”
Assertion Supported
Rauch: ChatGPT and Character.ai are in the top 1,000 most-trafficked websites
“For example, in the top 1000, you already have ChatGPT and Character.ai. They're in the top 1000 most trafficked websites of the public internet, so to speak.”
Assertion Supported
Rauch: Vercel and Next.js power ChatGPT, Under Armour, and Nintendo
“In fact, it's powered by Next.js, our open source framework to websites like underarmor.com or Nintendo, where we provide the infrastructure to serve All their traffic and help them iterate on their web presence.”
Assertion Supported
Rauch: Jenni.ai grew from $1M to $1.5M ARR in two months
“I've been just looking at startups like Jenny.ai where, you know, they went from a million in ARR to 1.5 million ARR over the past two months on creating a very specialized product to assist researchers in writing research papers.”
Disclosure
Vercel Plans to Add Voice, Audio, and Image Generation to AI SDK
“So the, as the SDK currently also plugs into all this sort of text oriented LLMs, but we're planning to add voice audio image generation, sort of to bring more tools into the toolkit of front engineers.”
Guillermo Rauch