Guillermo Rauch: Building v0 and the AI SDK

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Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js, the AI SDK, and v0. He’s been building developer tools since creating Socket.IO in 2010, and now he’s focused on making AI the default way to build software.

From Realtime to AI-First

Rauch started his career solving hard problems in web development. Socket.IO became the standard for realtime communication on the web. Next.js became the React framework that developers actually wanted to use. After founding Vercel (originally ZEIT) in 2015, the company grew into a $3.25 billion platform.

In 2023, the company pivoted hard toward AI. The result was v0 — a tool that lets you describe what you want to build in plain English and get working code back.

v0: Natural Language to Working Apps

v0’s pitch is simple: “What do you want to create?” You describe a contact form, image editor, or dashboard, and it generates the code. Not boilerplate templates — actual working applications with real functionality.

The tool won a 2025 Webby Award for developer tools, but the real validation is in the workflow it enables. You can:

Start from a text prompt or an existing template
Edit visually with design mode
Connect to GitHub and push code to your repo
Deploy to production with one click

The “agentic by default” approach means v0 doesn’t just generate code — it plans, creates tasks, and connects to databases as it builds. It’s closer to having a junior developer than a code autocomplete.

AI SDK: The TypeScript Layer

While v0 handles the consumer-facing magic, the AI SDK is the infrastructure layer. It’s an open-source TypeScript toolkit that abstracts away the differences between AI providers.

The key insight: switching between OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other provider should be a one-line change. The SDK handles streaming, tool calling, structured outputs, and the messy details of working with LLMs.

From the AI SDK 6 announcement:

Thomson Reuters used the AI SDK to build CoCounsel, their AI assistant for attorneys, accountants, and audit teams, with just 3 developers in 2 months. Now serving 1,300 accounting firms, they’re migrating their entire codebase to the AI SDK.

The SDK now has over 20 million monthly downloads. Version 6 added proper agent abstractions, MCP support, and the tooling to build production AI applications.

The Philosophy: Ship Fast, Stay Flexible

Rauch’s approach to AI tools reflects his broader philosophy on developer experience. From a developer testimonial:

“With the AI SDK available, I’m always thinking: How can I make this process as automatic as possible for the user? Because the barrier to implementing it is just a matter of minutes.”

The pattern is consistent across Vercel’s products:

Abstraction over vendor lock-in: One API for all LLMs
Streaming by default: Don’t make users wait
Framework-agnostic: Works with React, Vue, Svelte, whatever
Production-ready primitives: Handle the hard stuff (error recovery, tool execution loops, type safety)

What This Means for Builders

If you’re building AI-powered applications in TypeScript, the AI SDK is probably the fastest path to production. It handles:

Unified provider API across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others
Generative UI for dynamic interfaces
Streaming responses with proper error handling
Agent abstractions with tool loops

v0 represents a different bet — that eventually, describing what you want is more efficient than writing code yourself. It’s not there yet for complex applications, but for landing pages, dashboards, and standard components, it’s surprisingly capable.