Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js)
1. Embrace Limitless Building
Do not put limits on what you can build, ship, and dream about making possible on web surfaces, as AI tools like VZero enable more full-stack capabilities for product builders.
2. Live & Iterate in Product
Constantly immerse yourself in the product, be in the design, and spend time tuning and trying out new ideas, rather than being removed from the product or feeling powerless to make changes.
3. Increase Product Exposure Hours
To develop ’taste’ and product intuition, actively try many products and quantify the time you spend watching how people use your own products and others'.
4. Understand Underlying Mechanics
Learn how things work ‘under the hood’ (e.g., CSS, layout, symbolic systems) to better influence AI models and make them follow your intentions.
5. Cultivate Math & Eloquence
Develop strong math skills for fundamental logic and eloquence (linguistic ability) to effectively steer AI models with precise language and references.
6. Present & Share Your Work
Actively present what you’ve built and put yourself out there (e.g., at hackathons, on social media) to build an audience, communicate effectively, and establish your brand.
7. Master Foundational Infrastructure
Focus on learning foundational infrastructure engineering, as LLMs orchestrate existing tools and infrastructure rather than building them from scratch, making this a highly valuable skill.
8. Focus on Experience, Iterate
Focus on the desired end-user experience and product function, be open-minded about what AI tools can implement, and embrace an iterative approach, even by simply prompting ’try something else’.
9. Learn to Get Unstuck
Develop the skill of getting unstuck by seeking help, including from other AI tools (e.g., copying VZero code into ChatGPT for solutions), and leverage ’escape hatches’ like editing generated code directly.
10. Integrate Tight Feedback Loops
Create many opportunities for users to give feedback directly within the product (e.g., inline forms, emoji reactions) to continuously capture insights and improve AI models and product iterations.
11. Prioritize Front-End Experience
When building, start with the front-end and user experience first, then get more ambitious and make it full-stack, focusing on quality and performance throughout the process.
12. Seek Exposure, Define Frontier
To develop taste, continuously expose yourself to how people use products, stay at the frontier of trends and innovations, and even strive to define new frontiers.
13. Observe Others Using Product
Give your product to another person and watch them interact with it to expose yourself to the reality of how it’s used, leading to stronger, more grounded, and humbled insights.
14. Engage Customers, Use Products
Regularly schedule customer meetings, use their products yourself (dogfooding), and invite them to demo their usage to uncover pain points and non-intuitive aspects.
15. Scope Down AI Tasks
When working with large codebases or complex projects, scope down AI tasks to specific components or files to improve the AI’s ability to reason and reduce context window limitations.
16. Use Stylistic AI Prompts
When seeking design improvements from AI, use descriptive stylistic tokens (e.g., ‘jazzy,’ ‘pop,’ ’neo-brutalist,’ ‘vintage’) to unleash its creativity and transfer abstract ideas into reality.
17. Embrace Product Quality Effort
Understand that great product quality requires ‘blood, sweat, and tears,’ obsessive attention to a thousand little details, creative restraint, extensive testing, and dogfooding.
18. Foster AI Experimentation
Create dedicated time and space (e.g., ‘demo Fridays’) for teams to step out of their comfort zones, experiment with AI tools, and build and ship new things.