First of Kind: The @rauchg interview
Season 3 starts now. I sat down with Guillermo in San Francisco to talk about layout shift, random acts of AI, and a dragon painted in a single stroke.
00:00 Human Effort Is Still Underrated
00:44 Chief Executive, Chief Designer
02:33 Two Bets: Software and English
05:15 Gmail Was My Siren Call
11:06 Exposure Hours
14:49 Layout Shift / One Stroke Dragon
17:10 No Random Acts of AI
25:17 Can Agents Have Taste?
30:15 Software Factories and Manufacturing Agent Customers
34:59 Everything Is Communication
38:04 A New American Story
41:52 Lifemaxxing
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of @vercel. Growing up in Argentina, he taught himself English in order to teach himself programming, then went on to create @nextjs and other foundational technology for the real-time web.
In our conversation, Guillermo explains why he designed Vercel’s first command line before writing any code, why layout shift erodes trust, and why his company won’t commit any “random acts of AI.”
G is not just a chief executive. He’s a chief designer.
—
Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon
First of Kind, S3:E01 @firstofkind
Hosted by @soleio and produced with @room3nyc
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@framer @noondesign @bot @tryramp @vercel @meetgranola @profound
Jason retweeted
Lesser known academic theory about horror/sci-fi movies is that they’re often used to externalise society's deepest traumas into monsters and dystopias.
So I used Argon to tap into cultural symptomatology and psychoanalytical film theory to create this website which traces 100+ horror/sci-fi works and the social themes that they actually mirror across 7 eras.
Enjoy your days upto the Halloween with this project!
culturalcanary.ai.studio
Used Gemini for deep research, Argon in Antigravity used Nano Banana to generate the movie figurines + create the build, AI Studio to add the final finishing touches.
Jason retweeted
Thrilled to welcome @spacexai as a Founding Corporate Patron for the Omacom Foundation. That's $1,500,000 in @grok tokens for the maintenance and development of Omarchy. Maybe soon they'll be beamed straight from orbit? Let's go 🚀🌕 omarchy.org/news/2026/10/spa…
Constant communication is what makes autonomy like this safe. Early contact lets us take maneuvering responsibility, publish ephemeris faster than ground radar can catalog the object, and deorbit and keep commanding through demise if needed
We treat early communications as a requirement, not a nice-to-have
Impressive. This set of talks, along with the new America dot gov website, has the unmistakable feel of an Apple launch event. They're rebooting the federal government as a tech startup. Several observations.
(1) First, with this new AI interface to the entire federal government, if it works as promised, there won't be a single American who can't say their life wasn't helped at least in part by AI, or that the benefits accrued solely to zillionaires. This in itself cannily mitigates anti-datacenter sentiment.
(2) Second, Joe Gebbia and Marco Rubio's talks on simplifying name changes and passport filings introduce a completely new era where the US government is actually launching tangible features that benefit users.
(3) Third, this launch event in and of itself may visibly drive reform. It could become much more important than the State of the Union. Unlike laws, code is user-visible, and can be instantly audited by the public, as Obama found out with the failed obamacare website launch. So: the annual America dot gov event may be substance, whereas SOTU is traditionally optics. I wouldn't be surprised to see the President present at the next one.
(4) Fourth, this kind of event is a perfect example of where tech and red cooperate best. They both hate bureaucracy. Automating paperwork with code reduces the power of statists over both capitalists and nationalists. It's also hard to undo by other admins: once you digitize a process, hard to turn it back to paper.
(5) Fifth, it's an obvious point perhaps, but think about how much influence YCombinator has had in 20 years. From Gebbia's Airbnb joining their 2009 batch to a complete overhaul of the user interface of the US bureaucracy, and thus the US government.
(6) Sixth, this is another take on the network state. The functional part of the US (the network, meaning tech) is merging with and partially reforming the dysfunctional part (the state, meaning bureaucracy) by automating 20th century paper forms.
As a tech startup, there will no doubt be bugs and user issues and so on, but unlike with paper laws those issues will be visible and the code fixes will be verifiable. A new era of AI America. Rooting for them.
Dylan Field@zoinkSep 29United States
United StatesConnected via United States App StoreAccount-level information, not a live location or per-post device.
Congrats to the @ndstudio team on launch of America.gov ! 🇺🇸
Jason retweeted
Jarvis didn't need 17 employees named after Star Wars characters, he was the showrunner and crew
Jason retweeted
Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway:
🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6%
While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2).
(Do note that's the spend for inference of the model across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open weight labs.)
Jason retweeted
it is the golden age for having an ambitious goal and creating a personal software layer to hold you accountable, effectively & beautifully
Jason retweeted
oh hi it's been a while. :)
sharing a few updates: i've recently joined @profound, we raised a $180M series D, and to celebrate, @MikaelSargsyan @ambedgar @s3frn and i shipped some nice updates to the website.
finally feeling excited to get back to sharing more stuff here.
Jason retweeted
Great time to repost this I think. Very much at the core of @elyxdesign too; if they're your files you can do with them whatever you want, store them wherever, manipulate them however - and with Elyx being plain text on your computer there's no barrier or limit, no MCP gate, nothing. All yours, go nuts, be creative.
File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.
The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.
The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.
Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems.
Paraphrasing something I wrote recently:
> If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.
These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.





























