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The New Application Layer - Malte Ubl, CTO Vercel
Takeaway
Agents unlock a much larger market of automatable software, and the highest-leverage archetypes are simple research-compression and information-surfacing, not autonomous heroics.
Summary
- Vercel's CTO frames agents as a new economically-viable software category enabling software that was previously too expensive to write with if-statements
- Cheaper software production increases demand (elastic market), so engineer demand goes up not down despite the SaaS-pocalypse fears
- Concrete agent archetypes: agent-as-a-service (CRMs/Decagon), 'compressed research' agents that do the lookup phase before a human decision (Vercel sales+abuse routing examples)
- Other archetypes: surfacing internal information across silos, plus chat-app glue via his chat-SDK and a TypeScript bash interpreter ('just-bash') for sandboxed agent shells
agentsvercelapplication-architecture
Original description
AI engineering is the legitimate successor to web development and the mainstream discipline that will define the next decade. Drawing on Vercel's own experience, Malte explores what it means to build infrastructure and applications in a world where agents are both the builders and users of software. In a future where the major AI labs commoditize, the real value will sit with the engineers building on top. The application layer is where the innovation happens, and AI engineers are the ones who will shape it. Speaker info: - https://x.com/cramforce - https://www.linkedin.com/in/malteubl/