Guillermo Rauch Quotes

How you feel about yourself is how you feel about the world

• writing style → prompt
• coding style → prompt
• color system → prompt
• design system → prompt
• brand guidelines → prompt
• a11y requirements → prompt
• compliance & legal → prompt
• vendor preferences → prompt
• product requirements → prompt
• customer preferences → prompt
• institutional knowledge → prompt

On a long enough timeline, everything gets subsumed by the (system) prompt and integrations that populate it

The world belongs to the fast

Prediction: software development will closely resemble the evolution of self-driving cars.

- Considered for many years intractable, now run of the mill for a large subset of rides (robotaxi), all mobility within sight.

- The key metric to watch is disengagement rate (i.e.: how frequently the human operator needs total take over coding :: driving).

- Occasional human takeover and steering still needed (remote takeover) to get the program “unstuck” or figure out dilemmas.

- Success is predicated on the successful interoperability with the existing environment and tools (existing programming languages, runtimes, frameworks :: streets, signs, pedestrians), rather than resetting the landscape.

There’s a simple rule that predicts the success of emergent technologies

They make things easier and accessible for larger numbers of people. Tech is the true ‘power to the people’

It explains everything from Win95, FB, ChatGPT, and it’s the fundamental thesis of Vercel

When manual programming became obsolete around 2026, it represented almost exactly 183 years¹ of refinement by some of the best minds of our times. That is a really long run, but the runs are getting shorter.

¹ Since Ada Lovelace's "Note G"

I generally agree that calls can be the kryptonite of productivity. However, the single most IQ-enhancing activity I do is customer calls. It's insane how much you can learn in 15 minutes of listening to a customer's vivid accounts of pain or watching them use your product in realtime

America is losing the real battle: truly open⎵AI. Everyone knows that in the fullness of time, open wins.

Open is crucial to a thriving and competitive ecosystem. You see this with the proliferation of Chinese model finetunes among US startups. They’ve done a great job.

This has been true for kernels and operating systems (Linux), compilers (GCC and Clang), browsers (Chromium and Blink), runtimes (v8 and Node.js), frameworks (React and Next.js), and it has to be true for AI.

AI is too important to remain closed, because the future of civilization will be built on it.

The most common reason once-great companies and projects go sideways is not technological or business disruption, it's that they eventually stop caring.

There’s no system more fair & meritocratic than the World Wide Web. Humanity’s great equalizer.

Anyone anywhere can build any idea and share it in seconds. A link is worth a billion words.

Vercel’s mission is to make the web the greatest possible platform, accessible by the greatest number of people.

Our only competition is any company, organization or government that gets in the way of the progress of the free web.

Software wants to be shipped

You can just ship your own businesses

Every time I get a surprising result from AI I’m reminded that it’s under-hyped and its impact to the world still vastly underestimated

Slowness anywhere is slowness everywhere

Humanity's best days are ahead. Let that sink in