Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Software Will Never Die Completely
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch stated that software will never die completely: products like Google Reader that have been shut down can be generated and deployed by users themselves, permanently owned by them. This statement connects generative coding and one-click deployment in a closed loop. Vercel achieved 1 billion deployments in about ten years, followed by an additional 1.4 billion in approximately ten months; he predicts that the amount of new software produced next year may exceed the total historical stock of software, much of which will be personal-level or even one-time small tools. Deployment has been reduced to about one second, including global distribution, firewalls, immutable versions, domain names, and rollbacks.
Proxies have become the main force in deployment. Publicly, daily deployments can reach about 6 million, with about half triggered by programming proxies; clients using Claude account for about 1% of users but contribute nearly 15% of deployments, with the proportion of proxy-initiated deployments rising from about 5% to over 20%. The company's valuation once reached around $9.3 billion, supported by Accel and the Singapore sovereign fund among others. The model training corpus favors Next.js, with deployments defaulting to Vercel.
Since Google Reader was shut down in 2013, RSS reading has relied on third-party solutions. Rauch's argument is that product death no longer equals functional death, as interfaces and logic can be regenerated. The risk lies on the other side: data access, auditing, costs, and security of the generated products; he calls 2025 the year of prototypes and 2026 the year of cleanup. Experiments with generative interfaces aim to connect models directly to the rendering layer, making personal software more fragmented and denser.
The market mechanism charges for deployment entry. Buyers are individuals and teams writing applications with proxies, while sellers are platforms that connect generated results to global edge networks. The event-driven aspect stems from this product philosophy. Beneficiaries are cloud-edge platforms that become the default hosting ground for models, while those under pressure are super applications that rely on shutting down old products and forcing migration. Funding is shifting from subscription-based large company products to generation, hosting, and pay-per-request billing.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Rauch has transformed front-end frameworks into a deployment network from Socket.IO to Next.js, with a business model of "go live as soon as it's written." Google Reader is specifically mentioned because the shutdown of major products has historically been a death sentence for internet products. Generative proxies turn that death sentence into instantly replicable source code; what Vercel aims to do is become the default guardian and resurrection platform for that source code. The surge in deployment volume is not due to faster manual coding but because proxies never sleep.
The capital path is model-generated code, and platforms collect traffic. Funding is used to make edge networks, firewalls, and observability callable APIs for proxies. Those favored by models reap the benefits, as evidenced by 1% of users contributing to 15% of deployments. Money does not buy reader copyrights but pays for bandwidth, function execution, and domain names after single generation. Personal software "always belongs to you," provided that the bills and platform rules still belong to the hosting provider.
This parallels the replacement of proprietary software by open source, blogs by portal shutdowns, and cloud storage by local disks. The industry is in an expansion phase from "company products" to "personal generative products": an oversupply of software with concentrated distribution entry.
The structural change is technological substitution. The power to shut down has shifted from product companies to generative and hosting stacks. The mechanism is: when major companies stop their servers, functionalities disappear; when models and edge networks can replicate similar applications within a second, what disappears is merely the brand, not the workflow. Thus, platform competition has shifted from feature lists to "can it make dead software come back to life instantly?"
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
- Products can be shut down, but workflows that can be generated will never die.
- After an oversupply of software, what is scarce is the entry point to bring it back to life with one click.
- Applications that always belong to you often have bills that belong to the platform.