# Agent-facing products need APIs and CLIs, not just polished UIs

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/agent-facing-products-need-apis-and-clis-not-just-polished/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) · Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel. · Founded Vercel, which created Next.js and the v0 AI tool for building websites.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/), Aug 25, 2026
- Moment: 59:17 to 1:02:55 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/agent-facing-products-need-apis-and-clis-not-just-polished/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3557

## Quote

> “They need access to the **foundations of computing**. They don't need the interfaces that were created for human beings.”
> — [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) at [1:02:32](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3752) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. Agents need access to computing foundations, not only human interfaces.
2. Designers should consider APIs and CLIs as product interfaces.
3. Infrastructure must evolve for agents as well as people.

## About this segment

Guillermo Rauch says agents need close-to-the-metal interfaces and infrastructure designed for their workflows. That changes what companies should build and what product designers should prioritize.

From “Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)”, Aug 25, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[59:23](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3563) And then on the application cloud itself, how does the cloud need to, or the infrastructure offering need to evolve where the user is now an agent versus a human? Two primordial dimensions. So one is the services that are needed for the agent age are fundamentally different. The inventor of the cloud, let's call it, was Amazon Web Services. They created a bunch of services that made sense for the web.

[59:51](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3591) One of them, for example, is the CDN. And so a CDN was necessary because origins could go down or they couldn't scale and you need to cache data and you need to globally distribute static content. The disruption that Vercel brought to the web world was we realized that content was no longer static, it was dynamic. And so we needed to build a modern CDN for how the web was evolving. More personalized, obviously today more generative, more dynamic.

[1:00:23](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3623) But now we're not just building dynamic web applications, we're also building agents. And so the metaphor has, you know, a striking similarity. Because just like we needed a CDN for pages, now we need a CDN for tokens. And so this is a new service, AI Gateway, that was invented for the agent H. And so that's one dimension is what are the net new building blocks that you need to build agents? So AI gateway, sandbox, these have metaphors to the cloud computing age of yesterday year. And the other thing that you need is that, you know, it used to be that you as a human being need to study. Okay, so for an agent, I need an AI gateway. Okay, got it. You go to a workshop.

[1:01:08](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3668) oh and the agent will run code so I need to run it in a secure sandbox all right sandbox that's not going to happen anymore yeah the agent chooses everything the human says I want to build an agent and it says okay I'm going to use Eve I'm going to use Ejeguero I'm going to do this I'm going to do that and so what we're thinking about is okay what are people wanting to build and how can we be there for their agents and so it's a combination of having the new services but it's so many, you know, the founder of Notion called this, it's the design has changed dramatically.

[1:01:44](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3704) Actually, he had such a profound statement. There's companies in the Valley that have been known for their glorious, beautiful UIs and illustrations and iconography, fonts, et cetera. And he says something that was striking. He said, designers should now be designing CLIs and APIs. It's like, think about that. You were using a design tool, illustrating, whatever. And now you have to think about an interface that was created in the 1970s for the BT100 terminal.

[1:02:19](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3739) You know, my wife was asking me the other day, what is TTY? And I think it stands for teletype writer. And it's this like ancient technology. Like it's like you have to go to like a museum to learn about these things. It turns out agents need this new, more fundamental, more close to the metal interfaces. They need access to the foundations of computing. They don't need the interfaces that were created for human beings.

[1:02:46](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=3766) And so it's really important that companies are able to very quickly iterate to that.