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 Vercelโs first command line before writing any code, why layout shift erodes trust, and why his company wonโt commit any โrandom acts of AI.โ
G is not just a chief executive. Heโs a chief designer.
โ
Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon
First of Kind, S3:E01 @firstofkind
Hosted by @soleio and produced with @room3nyc
Powered by our sponsors:
@framer@noondesign@bot@tryramp@vercel@meetgranola@profound
Go behind the scenes of Made by Sound.
A story of music, collaboration and craft with @fredagainagain1 and NEST Acoustics. Discover how sound brought the Apple Music logo to life, captured entirely in camera. Just music, made visible.
@yongfook It's the eyebrow label from every 2023 SaaS template, so models learned it as "this looks designed." Same with purple gradients, glassy cards and everything centeredโฆ
Today we are re-launching shaders in https://t.co/QCeiUQKHOF. We call them Vibe Shaders. There's nothing else like them. They live next to your .pen files as GLSL files and can be easily vibecoded right on the canvas. Built by designers for designers.
They deserved a special Shader Mode, a focused mode to finetune the uniforms directly in the context of your design.
In addition to the classic Shader Fills, we've also added Shader Effects. This allows for incredible creative flexibility, as it applies the effect on a whole object tree that's part of a particular frame and you can change everything live, no hustling with textures.
Additionally we are also launching Background Shaders, they sample the texture from everything below the object. Imagine creating your own custom background blur or a partial dither effect for objects below a frame.
You can also create shaders with 3D transformations to vector logos or build custom shader brushes for vectors paths.
Forget having just a fixed set of shaders, this is next level and only possible, because we have a full control over our custom renderer. We also automatically compute the SDF (signed distance field) in realtime, so vectors that have applied shaders can be changed directly on canvas without the need to re-export a new SDF file, an incredible time-saver.
Look for the samples in Goodies, which has been updated with a ton of new examples.
Or simply pair @pendev with the latest models, drop in a bunch of images, ask agent to build you a shader and it's guaranteed you will feel an explosion of your creative superpowers!
The new HomePod shader was so catchy I had to rebuild it in @pendev
Grab it and vibe it to perfection.
Link in the replies
Btw, there's a new Pen release with a pretty cool shader mode!