These Comments from Vercel CTO Malte Ubl Struck Home
Vercel CTO Malte Ubl shares wisdom on building AI products: stay humble about user needs, dogfood your abstractions, and pick the right problems for agents.
Swyx Catches Up With Malte Ubl
Malte Ubl serves as CTO at Vercel, where he leads technical strategy and engineering for the platform that powers some of the web’s most performant sites. Before Vercel, Ubl was a key figure at Google, where he created the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project.1
Shortly after Vercel’s recent Ship AI event, Swyx from Latent Space had a chance to check in with Ubl, and I curated a few snips below.2
Snip: Stay Humble, It’s Very Early Yet
One of Vercel’s successful AI initiatives is AI SDK, which like many Vercel projects such as Next.js, is completely open source.
Swyx asks Ubl what he credits for the project’s success (other than its perfect name):
Snip: Dogfooding
I love this as a founding principle:
More context here:
Snip: Pick the Right Problem for Agents
Ubl nails the paradox of agents and AI generally—when they’re bad, they’re really bad, and when they’re good, they’re magical:
We simply need to pick the right problems!
