PRODUCT

Vibe coding's real win: non-technical staff writing production code

Nat Rubio-Licht: What do you think companies are getting wrong as they deploy AI into their development teams? What do you think they’re getting right?

Malte Ubl: Obviously, companies deploy AI beyond development teams, but the development side, in a way, is the most mature. It's where AI is best today. What people get right is that initially, there's nothing wrong with just getting that 30% speed boost. You get from either Ccopilot or Ccursor or any of these tools that take your existing developers and make them a little bit more productive … but I think where there's almost more potential is in seeing if the entire process of developing software can be changed.

For example, when we built our tool v0, which now would be called our vibe coding tool, originally, we thought we were building a tool for front engineers … What actually had the biggest impact was when the tool became so good that non-technical users could use it and essentially become more verticalized folks. How fast my programmers can program was never the problem.

TOGETHER WITH SNYK

Is Your AI-Generated Code Secure?

Join Snyk on Thursday, November 20, at 11am ET for Securing Vibe Coding: Addressing the Security Challenges of AI-Generated Code, a live session with Snyk Staff Developer Advocate Sonya Moisset. She’ll unpack the security implications of Vibe Coding and share practical strategies for securing AI-generated code at scale.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify vulnerabilities in AI-generated code

• Apply secure coding practices for GenAI-powered workflows

• Build AI-native apps with security in mind—from code to deployment

Plus, ISC2 members earn 1 CPE credit for attending live!

AI STRATEGY

Why Vercel bets on agents that still need human oversight

Nat: I saw a piece a few weeks ago on your company’s ability to train AI agents on the complex work of top-performing employees, giving Vercel the ability to replace several employees with agents. How do you expect that to manifest in other parts of your organization or others?

Ubl: I think my somewhat hot take is that our expectations of what agents can do are biased to the optimistic because of how well they work in coding. There's so much work being done in the world that falls below the threshold of what AI can do today, yet is high-impact to automate. Like, if you interview an employee and ask them what they hate about their job, it tends to yield answers that fall into the sweet spot of current generative AI. My thesis is that most companies have a lot of these tasks.

Nat: How does Vercel approach ethical and responsible AI?

Ubl: We are actually very big believers in human-in-the-loop. It's often not a trade-off. If I can make something so much more efficient through agentic optimization that paying the small price of having someone look it over and make sure it's actually correct, it's totally worth it. And it's still maybe 80% more efficient.

TOGETHER WITH SNYK

What’s The Deal With “Vibe Coding”?

AI-generated workflows are accelerating dev velocity… and expanding your attack surface.

Join Snyk's Securing vibe coding live workshop on Nov 20 at 11am ET with Sonya Moisset, Staff Developer Advocate at Snyk, where she breaks down how to secure “vibe-coding” AI tools at scale.

📅 Attend live and earn 1 CPE credit when you register with your (ISC)² Member ID.

THE FUTURE

The trust problem when everyone can build enterprise apps

Nat: Where do you see Vercel’s place in the market in the coming years?

Ubl: Where we always see our place in the market is that we aim to help developers around the world really enjoy working with our tools. We like saying: Vercel built Vercel on Vercel. We are constantly using our own technology. So we are really aiming to be very, very confident in our own stuff by using it ourselves. 

Nat: Where do you see AI-powered web development going?

Ubl: It’s going from vibe coding essentially in two different directions. One is that we're seeing a lot of like adoption in terms of prototyping, and we're aiming to make v0 good enough that companies can truly create production code in a more diversified fashion, across their employee base, to have non-engineers be able to contribute production code in a way that feels natural for them. 

The other part we are very interested in is building internal applications and agents that are compatible and satisfy both productivity and the breadth of the audience. Being able to build apps that vibe-coding enables by making it enterprise-secure.

The entire enterprise architecture essentially relies on the fact that I need to be able to trust my engineers. And in the future, with non-engineers building applications and AI being 100% reliable, I need to rethink whether I can trust my applications. 

A QUICK POLL BEFORE YOU GO

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