Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Everything is Code
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch stated that the biggest lesson from artificial intelligence is that everything is code: slides, designs, promotional videos, and form automation, and the universe may also be composed of code.
He reiterated the same point in a podcast: coding is a misnomer; dragging columns in spreadsheets is essentially tool invocation and scripting; gateway data shows that most global token volume comes from programming agents. Vercel claims approximately 6 million deployments per day, half triggered by programming agents, with AI gateways averaging over a trillion tokens daily. The proportion of agent deployments rose from nearly 5% in June 2025 to over 21% in February 2026, with about 70% coming from Claude Code.
The company started with Next.js and frontend cloud, later launching v0 for generating interfaces, a sandbox, and an agent framework named Eve. In September 2025, it raised $300 million led by Accel and Singapore's GIC, with a reported valuation of about $9.3 billion; by the end of February 2026, annualized revenue was approximately $340 million, an increase of about 86% year-on-year. Rauch stated that English is becoming a popular programming language, with the creator pool expanding from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of instant messaging users.
The slogan turns non-engineering positions into potential deployment sources, thereby linking hosting bills to agent outputs. Slide and video generation still consume models and bandwidth, and do not automatically equate to maintainable production systems.
"Everything is code" lowers the entry barrier while increasing the runtime and security surface area. He stated elsewhere that anything that can be hacked will be hacked, and it will be autonomous attacks.
In market mechanics, buyers are teams that want to immediately put generated products online, while sellers are application clouds that charge based on deployment and bandwidth. The driving force is the explosion of programming agents, which is a technological event. Funds flow from model calls to preview links and production domains. The beneficiaries are the default hosting layer Vercel, while the pressured parties are traditional software outsourcing that delivers via work orders, and the security budget needed to cage the agents.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Guillermo Rauch frames the deployment experience of Next.js as a worldview: everything that can be previewed is a program. v0 allows designers to create interfaces, Eve transforms natural language into organizational processes, and the sandbox confines agents. The token volume comes from robots that write code, and once the robots finish, they must have a place to run; Vercel charges a "toll" for that running. The 86% revenue growth rate reflects the slope of this toll. Hailing from Argentina, he uses a single English slogan to pull non-engineers into the same production line.
The capital path is the combination of frontend cloud and agent gateway. The $300 million investment from sovereign funds bets on the exponential growth of deployment numbers alongside token volume. The motivation is to prevent laboratories from tying models and hosting together; the strategy is to have agents default to pushing products to Vercel instead of building their own Kubernetes. The foundational layer "do not rewrite with ambient programming" is selling platform inertia.
Analogous examples include Heroku turning pushes into deployments, Shopify transforming stores into templates, and AWS converting servers into APIs. Vercel treats preview links of the generative era as a new git push. The phase is shifting from developer tools to the hosting layer of agent operating systems.
This is a technological replacement. The replacement is the "code writers" as the sole producers. The mechanism is: natural language is transformed into files by models, files become URLs via the platform, and URLs are billed based on traffic. When the replacement is complete, the bottleneck shifts from syntax to permissions, data, and vulnerability to hacking. The flatter the slogan, the flatter the attack surface.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
When everything is code, everything can be deployed and hacked.
The faster agents write, the tighter the hosting bills follow.
The entry point becomes English, while the gate remains domain names and permissions.