# Vercel encodes design taste into reusable components and agents

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-encodes-design-taste-into-reusable-components-and/ 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: 23:34 to 26:55 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-encodes-design-taste-into-reusable-components-and/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1414

## Takeaways

1. Shared components make polished interfaces easier to produce.
2. Vercel's design team is building an agent to review polish.
3. Design standards can be turned into skills and agents.

## About this segment

Guillermo Rauch says reusable UI components raise the baseline for product quality. Vercel is also building an agent to apply its design standards, so taste can scale beyond a growing design team.

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.

[23:40](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1420) make one theme that i consistently read as i was preparing for this was that there's two two things that pull pull at each other i think one is that this culture of a trade to greatness it seems like there's a lot of urgency at worst self on the other side you're obsessed with taste do you see them pulling at each other or you think no it's fine in a naive way yes because are you going to ship slop and then you iterate a greatness i will say part of the hiring process part of the culture part of the platform that we give you sets the floor really high so let me give you another example of a fantastic quote-unquote founder within versell shat cn this gentleman created the world's most popular UI component framework.

[24:28](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1468) When you ask an AI, build me an application, nine times out of 10, he uses Shadzian, which incidentally is also his online nickname. What Shadzian did is he invented a component system that raised the floor of literally the entire internet. This sidebar that he gives you, beautiful and extensible. The button, the dropdown, even the AI components, the reasoning bar and the shimmering text and all this stuff off the shelf beautiful within versell we extended this component system into the versell geist component system so it's kind of hard to come into versell be competent be a high agency individual have access to all of these primitives and then like ship a pos into the world and so i think the platform itself versell is like a recursive self-improvement machine, right?

[25:22](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1522) The platform itself is constantly raising the floor. The agents, our design engineering team right now, I'm extremely excited about this. They were like, design engineering always weighs in on polish. The delight, the surprising details in the customer journey. But they know that to scale themselves, we can't just keep hiring a billion design engineers. And so right now they're working on the agent that gives you that review, that incorporates a lot of like, to your point about taste, it incorporates taste.

[25:53](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1553) I think people sometimes create this false dichotomy between AI and taste. You know what's tasteless is grabbing the model and having it output as it is. That's literally how you end up with purple gradients and highly separated uppercase text and a little green dot that says online out of the blue. Meta announced their new model today. And you know what else they did? They announced the skills. So one of the skills, I think they call it like the de-sloppifying or the anti-slop skill.

[26:22](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1582) It literally tells the model to like not be itself. Say, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. I think every company needs to take this very, very seriously because you can take a lot of that taste that you have, institutional best practices, et cetera, and turning them into skills and agents that'll give you massive, massive upside. Let's shift towards the heart of what's happening in the world today.

[26:45](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=1605) with AI. Let's start with engineering. How should engineers think of what's happening to their