According to CTO Malte Ubl, Vercel's core principle is rigorous dogfooding. Unlike "ivory tower" framework builders, Vercel ensures its abstractions are practical and robust by first building its own products (like V0) with them, creating a constant, reality-grounded feedback loop.
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In the fast-evolving AI space, Vercel's AISDK deliberately remained low-level. CTO Malte Ubl explains that because "we know absolutely nothing" about future AI app patterns, providing a flexible, minimal toolkit was superior to competitors' rigid, high-level frameworks that made incorrect assumptions about user needs.
The popular AISDK wasn't planned; it originated from an internal 'AI Playground' at Vercel. Building this tool forced the team to normalize the quirky, inconsistent streaming APIs of various model providers. This solution to their own pain point became the core value proposition of the AISDK.
The V0 team operates with minimal product management oversight, empowering product-minded engineers (often ex-founders) to make 95% of product decisions directly. This sacrifices potentially "perfect" choices for a dramatic increase in development velocity.
Vercel designer Pranati Perry advises viewing AI models as interns. This mindset shifts the focus from blindly accepting output to actively guiding the AI and reviewing its work. This collaborative approach helps designers build deeper technical understanding rather than just shipping code they don't comprehend.
The V0 business unit acts as the first and most demanding customer for Vercel's core platform. This "customer-vendor" relationship, rather than simple internal collaboration, provides high-quality, real-world feedback on infrastructure like billing and compute APIs.
V0's success stemmed from its deliberate constraint to building Next.js apps with a specific UI library. This laser focus was 'liberating' for the team, allowing them to perfect the user experience and ship faster. It serves as a model for AI products competing against broad, general-purpose solutions.
Vercel's CTO Malte Ubl outlines a third way for open source monetization beyond support (Red Hat) or open-core models. Vercel creates truly open libraries to grow the entire ecosystem. They find that as the overall "pie" grows, their relative slice remains constant, leading to absolute revenue growth.
To maximize speed, V0 operates with a "no handoffs" philosophy. Everyone, including designers and product managers, is expected to contribute code and submit their own pull requests. This "full-stack PM" model minimizes the coordination costs and wasted cycles of explaining changes.
Teams that claim to build AI on "vibes," like the Claude Code team, aren't ignoring evaluation. Their intense, expert-led dogfooding is a form of manual error analysis. Furthermore, their products are built on foundational models that have already undergone rigorous automated evaluations. The two approaches are part of the same quality spectrum, not opposites.
The V0 team dogfoods their own AI prototyping tool to define and communicate new features internally. Instead of writing specification documents, PMs build and share working prototypes. This provides immediate clarity and sparks more effective, tangible feedback from the entire team.