Why v0 creator left Vercel to fix GitHub (GOAT Jared Palmer)

Hi, man. This is Mark. Hey, Jared. You. Hey, guys. Hey. How's it going? Thanks a lot for coming out. Thanks for the Yeah.

Yes. What? Sick. I just didn't know. I know. They just finished recording our, like, recap, and I was like, I wanna check my my DMs.

Of course. I see. Yeah. Just there is fine, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Anywhere you want. What's up, everybody? We got Jared Palmer in the house today. We're at GitHub Universe. Always I got you. Pull him in. Jared just popped in, and we're stoked to talk to him.

You recently started a job at Microsoft slash GitHub and are are fixing all the problems. JS what's going on? I don't know about all the problems. Yeah. But, yeah. Then put do my best. Yeah. I'm, like

it's, like, day thirteen, fourteen. I was gonna say, yeah, it feels like it's fresh. It's fresh. It's fresh. So I'm still acclimating.

Okay.

But there's a lot of shared DNA between previously, I was at Vercel Yep.

And Guillermo, CEO of Vercel, and Nat Friedman are very close friends. And Nat used to be the the CEO of GitHub, and so it's a lot there. It's a lot of corporate DNA Yeah. Yeah. I think that has permeated through the evolution of the companies. And so and there's been a lot of, former GitHub that were that came to Vercel. Yeah. And so that's it's it's there's hints

of similarity, if that makes sense. Yeah. They're still getting acclimated. Totally. That's awesome. So you're the creator of v zero. Right? I am. I'm I'm curious to to get your thought on just workflow in general with with this type of stuff. So developers are listening to this podcast. We saw all these new tools be announced today.

You obviously have a lot of experience in the, like, v Deno, whereas, like, it happens in the browser, and then at some point, you you bring that out of there. Like, what are your thoughts on, like, what the developer workflow will look like with all these agents?

Yeah. I mean, I think that we need to do a better job as a community building out, like, continuity, if you will. Right? Yeah. Remember if it still feels like, remember before it still feels like maybe I'm gonna date myself. In high school, when you worked on a work, we didn't really have, like, Dropbox.

Right? And, like, the pre drop Dropbox days.

I know that it's, like, dating myself there, but it does kinda feel like that Wes you're so isolated. Yeah. And they're not fluid. There's no continuity. Your flow state gets broken. You you start one task, and you go off. You you kinda forget. And Yeah. It's called final dot j s. Drag drag drag and drop underscore underscore final final. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Totally. So so, anyway so I think that in the future and, ideally, one of the things I'm focused on is bringing continuity across all of the the the Microsoft, if you will, touch points, which is like and that's what's been so important about this reorganization around the core AI unit, which is Visual Studio, Versus Code, GitHub, and Azure AI Foundry. Okay.

And parts of Azure too. And the idea here is that, like, we should be working really tightly with the Versus Code team at GitHub, and we should be making handoffs super seamless. Right. Right? Yeah. And so when you start tasks in one, you should be able to pick them up in on the other and vice versa, and you're seeing that today. The other thing is that model choice is real.

Yeah. And I think developers want that choice. They always wanna use the bleeding edge. And so that's one of the announcements we had today that we're bringing third party models to to GitHub Copilot and GitHub Agent HQ, which is the new control plane from which you can kick off kinda background tasks and work through PRs and other things like that. So I'm really excited about that future. And then, I don't know if you caught it in the in the keynote.

If you do start a task in age in agent HQ or on GitHub, you can open that in Versus Code. Yeah. That that was the killer thing to me. I think that was the most encouraging new feature shown today just because, like we were saying, it's like so many times when those responses come back, if it's unusable at that point, you're like, okay. Now I'm Sanity it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Scrap the state. Or I scrap it entirely. Type in the box again and let it go run for fifteen minutes and then come back to it, and you you lose that flow state. Totally.

One of the things that I did testing that feature, so last week, Next. Js announced version 16. Yep. Very exciting. You guys probably covered it. If you didn't, whatever. But Scott was excited. A huge Nice fan. Sorry. I was Yeah. So so the first thing I did was and I thought this was pretty cool because one of the cool things about aging HQ is the prompt is actually set up to create PRs Mhmm. Which is a little different than, like, the Versus Node super interactive fast twitch, if you will, like, cursor. Yeah. Not background, but, like, cursor sidebar situation. Yep. The prompt that I gave was research the latest Next. Js 16 release and upgrade guide, then run all the code mods and upgrade my my site. Mhmm. And it just did it. And, like and it created five different commits. It created a draft PR, and it did take I think it took a I don't know. It's, like, ten minutes. That's okay. Yeah. But it did it, and then it ran all the e it Scott only did that, it it ran all five code Bos, migrated from Nexlint to the new ESLint CLI, and it Vercel it migrated to turbo pack, changed configuration, validated the builds, even included, like, now built in nine seconds of turbo pack. Anyway, I I guess to a point where it's like, I don't think a year ago, we were at this point. Oh, yeah. Agents. Yeah. Yeah. A year ago, we were sitting in this podcast booth talking about, like, better tab completion Or tab completion at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of amazing. Right? And so, anyway, the to your point, though, if that PR is, like, 80% ready Yeah. And we don't have an escape hatch Yeah. That's just, like, so much product pressure on us to, like Mhmm. Right? So this new pnpm in Versus Node fish feature, I'm very bullish on because it just keeps you in the flow. Right? Because we it's kinda like horseshoes and hangerines. We only need to get a little we kinda need to get close. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah. Yeah. Me personally, I think that's the thing I'll probably end up using the most beyond

bringing in Claude or any of these things. Because I'm always always assigning things to Copilot in out of issues right now. But being able to like you said, model choice is important. And now it's it's less of, hey. I'm assigning it to Copilot, and I'm assigning it to what I'm used to. I'm assigning it to what my flow is. You know? Which is great. I think that's awesome. And, being able to use Cloud Code or Kodak's or whatever agent you want, like, can Wes talk about kind of the background of of behind that as well-being having some choice? Yeah. I think it's important that we from from my short Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, the thirteen days. Yeah. Thirteen days. Yeah. But, obviously, like, I talked to,

to Satya before joining, and we had talked about some of the these these these big decisions, right, for the platform Yeah. Whether we should, like, allow third parties and stuff like that. Wes both agree. I think it seems like this past, at least, like, three to six months have shown that, like, giving model choice is what developers want. It is ultimately to the best product. And, you know, if you're talking about GitHub's mission, which is to empower developers to build awesome stuff, well, then, like, yeah. They should have model choice. Yeah. Kind of a no brainer.

And we'll do well if we stay true to the community Yeah. And focus on developers, and everything else will take care of itself. Yeah. Well, that's great. That's great.

So once you got hired, you went on a tear on Twitter. I've been I've been I've been throwing heaters. Yeah. I know. Yes. What can what can we fix? Yeah. How can we do it? So, are you just, like, coming in and fixing all the rendering issues, or, like, you have, like, a pretty not aggressive, but, like, you're No. Not You're good at getting shit done. Right? Obviously, Versailles was was like that as well. Yeah.

Thank you.

I a couple of things. I think that feedback is a gift. Yeah. And we've got such passionate, developers in this community, and they have such awesome opinions Yeah. That, like, sometimes you just gotta ask. Like, how can we make GitHub or I don't think I don't know of any time anybody from GitHub has asked that on pnpm. Like, how do we make GitHub puller press better? Yeah. Right? So but, like, how else will you know? Right? And it turns out that the top, ask was stack stack diffs. Yeah. You know? Right? Which I kinda knew Wes coming, but I was I was, and I did I did, ask. We can get into that in a second, but I'll answer that after. But no. You know? I've got a lot to learn. It's my, you know, thirteenth, fourteenth day here. Yeah.

And GitHub is a, a very I don't know. It's it's it's a it's like a legendary product. Let me say that. Yeah. It's an institution. Right? It's an institution. Right? So we're not gonna we're not gonna so change is coming in the sense that, like, we want to make sure that we are evolving with the times and building the best possible developer experience we can. Yeah. And I think that's gonna also change because just like we discussed just a couple minutes ago, like, we went from auto complete to, like, if an almost like a coworker. Yeah. Bos going off and doing work for you. An intern. Let's follow an intern. Fire it off from your phone. Right. Like, that's just different. So, like and and, also, it shouldn't require a different workflow. And so some of the stuff needs to evolve with that new workflow, and we're committed to, like, seeing that vision through. Okay. And so I think about what does it look like? What is what is a pull request in 2027? Yep. And I don't know the answer yet, but I'm pretty sure GitHub is gonna have to answer that question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna it might look a little bit different. Yeah. A little bit different. And that's exciting, and I think that's what we're we're driving and focusing, if that makes sense. That's cool. And then also to the performance side, like, this is something that's near and dear to my heart, and so we're also working on that too. That's been in the works, but I'm really excited about the team and the stuff that I've seen so far. So Yeah. But now you get to show up and take credit. Right? Because that's your your thing. Right. Right. Yeah. Show up and take credit. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I contributed to not as much as you could expect for for this, but I'm very happy and proud of the team. They put in a lot of effort. A lot of the stuff you're seeing today was started months and months ago, obviously. And so happy to cheerlead, but also, like, differential to the team. Like Yeah. They they Wes kick butt. Alright. Last question. You need to build something. What's your interface? Where are you starting? Are you starting in in v zero in a browser? Are you,

Npm scaffolding something? Are you taking off an agent? What are we building? You're building a podcast player website. Wes

is asking for personal reasons here. He wants to know where to start. What what what what what are you guys what would you use right now? I for me, I I would Npm

scaffold out something so that I have my, like, basics. You know? Like, I have them in place, maybe get pnpm everything running. And then Would you do that by hand? I would. I usually do that by hand because way too often, it picks the wrong tech. And would you, like, install, like, Shenzhen or or, like, a Yeah. Yeah. I install all the Scott that I decide I want. Yeah. Which I know was was part of the announcements today as well, which is planning mode.

Once I have that, I'll I head into, like, the agent tab and start kinda going back and forth with with agents, and it scaffolds it out, and I kinda talk back and forth to it. So that's my UI. But I'm always curious about, like I do that because, like, I'm a I I was a developer before this stuff, and that's what I'm comfortable with. Sure. Also curious, like, people who are not necessarily or not that you're not developer. Obviously, you are. But people who are are new to this stuff. Like, what does their UI look like? And I'm always curious to see what people

What do I use? Tackle. Yeah. What would you start with? Yeah. I use Svelte for everything. So I start with, like, SV.

There's a number of options, boiler plates and stuff that get going. Wes SV the the Svelte CLI? Yeah. Yeah. And so you couldn't even get database and all that stuff going right from there. Yeah. Shout out to Rich. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And by the time you're done with that, the the CLI, you have, oh, pretty much everything, like, ORM, everything configured, database. You have, your containers all set up. And just from there, that's when I'll hit, and go into a planning mode or I'm a little bit more on the, over over engineer on the, like, spec driven mode myself. So I'll start getting into specs,

and then go from there. But yeah. Yeah. The, so to answer the podcast question, I think I would do the same thing. I think I would start out with, like, my I would scaffold Yeah.

An XJS app. Biased.

Slightly biased. I would but, you know, SSR, it's important. Yeah. I would get, like, like, biome set up and, like like, everything, like, to that level. Yeah. That makes sense. I would install Shad c n. I probably would preinstall the sub subset of the components that I thought would be useful in the UI.

I actually did this, by the way. This is specific Wes. For for the un the old undefined site, I think I use that sometimes.

Does, like, a, sort of demo thing. And, like, I actually migrated it. It Wes it hadn't touched the site in so long, so it was in Gatsby. Mhmm. And I did the migration to Next. And what I did Wes, I think the Tailwind guys did a a a podcast template in one of their, Oh, yeah. Which I bought. But then, I copied that thing into a folder. Tailwind UI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I copied that into a folder. I downloaded a folder, and then I was like, yo. Look at this folder. But one thing I'll give JS a tip for those who are prompting, doesn't matter what which one of these agents you use.

A trick that, I should pick this up from the Claude Node team that works really, really well JS to prompt even before you either write a spec Yeah. Or actually go to execute, is to ask the model to do some research. Yes. Yeah. It's so powerful. It's been powerful for me. And even, like, getting into, like, database design or those types of things to pre research Like, go re research this. Yeah. Re like, get a sense of my code. Even that, those two prompts, go research this and get a sense of the code base or paste in a bunch of links and get context.

Packing that contact to me is so Vercel.

And then either, you know, write a plan.

There are some special keywords, by the way, for all these models. I don't know if you guys know this. Like No. Hit all of them. So have you heard of Ultrathink? Yes. Okay. So you can say Ultrathink, and that force is usually forced at least in the anthropic models will force, like, high reasoning. Okay.

Another sorta secret tip I'll share, which I found useful, something like emergent behavior, is if you ask these models to add logs, and assert statements, which is, like, low key, like, not many people use these days, but add assert statements and logs to maximize debugability. Yeah. That will that can sometimes that can be very helpful when you go to, like, hit it out. And the third one that I found interesting and this has helped me with planning. When I'm getting it to write a spec, I'll I'll put that in a markdown file, like to do or plan and sort of ephemeral. And I think we need to develop JS a community, like, a better way of doing this. It's Absolutely. So kinda out there. Yeah. But, like, maybe that's beautiful, but it's kinda it just seems, like, not right. Like, it's it seems like I've, like, redone my own custom, you know, spec flow, like, eight times. Yeah. So there's some there's, like, some spec anyway, figuring it out, but let's just put it in a markdown file. Yeah. But then what I do is I ask it to create a rubric for grading the spec or this plan, then grade it Yeah. Then revise it. Yeah. And that extra step of, like, it thinking through the rubric and then self evaluating, I've found to be quite useful. Mhmm. But it can go overboard, and so it ends up like I've probably seen this too. It's like week one to two, week three to four. I'm like, I haven't figured out how to get it to stop planning, like, twelve weeks sprints. Like, what is that about? We did, like, a vibe vibe

code on it. What is that? Yeah. Yeah. And Node I get it out. Yeah. And that was fine. It was, like, yeah, week one. Yes. Yeah. We were seeing who could get it done the fastest. Like, oh, can we get this done in ten minutes? Oh my gosh. And then it was like, okay. Week one. I'm like, no. What? Like, why does it do that?

That and that and, like, the the yapping at the end Yeah. The yapping. Tells you what it did. You gotta tell it, stop yapping. Stop yapping. Yeah. Yeah. Just give me the code. So funny. But yeah. So if I could figure out how to not have it make a twelve week plan Yeah. That would be great. And I'm too lazy to, like, correct it. Yeah. No. You're just like, yeah. Yeah. Well Maybe it's good. I don't know. But so that that's my some of my tips. The Rubrik thing is helpful.

Ultrathink is helpful. And then I would and then from there, what I'm really excited about now is with some of these, I don't think Cloud Code can do this yet, but I think but I know that, Versus Code can do this. I think, I saw something Cursor's gonna have this very soon too, which is the ability to have, like, n attempts or variants at the same prompt. Oh, yeah. Just, you know, throw throw money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just run them all away in, like like, branches or something like that. I think they yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trees.

I think that's prop I mean, yeah. Like, let's just, you Node.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Right. Rip. Fire three of them. Only Node hit. Yeah. Let let the interns do it. Right? So Hedging your code. Put a team on it. Yeah. Put a team on that. Anyway, so I think I think that those are my, like that's what I that's what I would do for a podcast. Right. Hell, yeah.

Awesome. Well, appreciate your time. Yeah. Thanks for coming out. Likewise. Yeah. Big fan. It was finally great to meet IRL in the flesh. And, yeah. Absolutely. See you guys around, and, happy to come on again. Yes. Thanks. Anytime. Alright. Thanks. Peace.