There was a time when building an app, be it to sell something or provide a specific service (like cab-booking), meant pulling all-nighters and constant back and forth with developers. Even if the product was ready to be deployed, you could never ship it without a team of devs standing by to troubleshoot in case anything goes wrong.

Today, the world is changing, with coding powers moving into the hands of everyday internet users, including those who aren’t as technologically savvy. The key? AI. It has made English the new programming language of the world.

This shift through AI has democratized access to product building, enabling anyone to code their app or website using nothing but plain descriptions. They just have to outline what they want, and the system gets to work to make it a reality. 

But, here’s the thing: even if you know what you want (but aren’t a coder), there could be places where you might feel stuck. You may get an unexpected technical error, or worse, you might not know what to ask the AI to do, especially when handling complex workflows in the backend or on the infrastructure side.

This is exactly what Vercel has set out to solve with the new v0.app.

Making apps on demand

Since 2015, Vercel has been the go-to tool for software development – a developer favorite, in fact. However, more than half of the company’s journey was about transforming frontend development with Next.js and one-click deployments. 

In 2023, Vercel took a leap with v0.dev, its first major move to simplify coding with AI. The platform used generative models to create UI components from text or image prompts. It saw immediate traction (as many expected), but one problem persisted: getting to the right outcome with minimal effort.

Despite the AI, users had to prompt time and again for fixes, better design, or added functionality. This meant that if a user didn’t know what’s needed to be done to fix a particular problem, they would be stuck on their own — unless, of course, a developer stepped in with a fix.

“v0 started as a tool for developers, but saw huge adoption from designers, marketers, PMs, and others who aren’t developers, with over 3.5 million users. These users loved the possibilities but needed an easier experience,” Zeb Hermann, the General Manager of v0, told Future Nexus.

To fix that gap, the company is now replacing v0.dev with v0.app. The new product not just creates but thinks as well, tapping into agentic intelligence to research, reason, create a step-by-step plan, and then act on it using tools like web search. This ensures it handles all development tasks end-to-end and enables anyone to bring their app to reality.

“We learned from other agentic projects like Codex and Claude Code that ‘tool calling’ is extremely important. The agent needs to be highly capable (with tools) – to do things like visit websites itself, do its own testing, etc. Plus, it needs to be interpretable and steerable. A lot of the complexity is getting the interaction with the user right – letting them see what the agent is doing when, letting them adjust and course correct, making the agent really good at executing on small tweaks to existing applications,” Hermann explained.

With a focus on these elements, v0.app serves as the one-stop shop for everything related to development. Once you put in your idea, the platform takes over to work on the frontend, backend, copy, design, and logic entirely. After implementation, it checks the output to find and fix errors.

The most important thing here, Hermann said, is that the users aren’t even required to have the perfect prompt for the product. They can just start off with something simple and work with the agent to iterate and refine before coming to the final result. 

“v0 keeps the last few messages in your chat directly in context. It can also search through your prior history and get access to a summary of your previous messages. To better make targeted edits, v0 will first select the files to read from a large codebase, and only read/modify those, instead of adding all files to context. These capabilities represent a large step forward for v0, which historically struggled with exactly the issue you’re describing,” he added.

The previous version of the tool already saw adoption from companies such as Cox Enterprises, WPP, and Belk, with their product managers, designers, and marketers using it to create prototypes, landing pages, and even working versions of products. And the upgraded release makes it accessible to even more non-technical users.

That said, while these capabilities mark a major shift in what v0 could do, it is not the only agentic product out there that makes app development as simple as just describing what you need. Companies like Lovable and Emergent are also tackling the same problem with their respective tools.

What does this mean for developers?

Whenever a new technology takes shape, fears about how it will impact the lives of people, especially how they go about their work, are bound to rise. The same is the case with these ‘vibe coding’ tools like v0, which, many say, can pose a threat to the jobs of programmers and developers.

Hermann, however, doesn’t see it as a threat but as a power shift in the role of developers, who will be expected to ship more complex features and solve hard engineering tasks with AI in their hands. He compared it to Excel, which everyone can use for basic data work, but some can use its advanced features to do more.

“There will always be a need for engineers. The expectation for an engineer’s output will go up (and this is already happening). A good engineer with AI can ship 5x more than a good engineer without AI, so now the bar is higher. The same holds true for non-technical people. ‘Being able to use Word/Excel’ is no longer a job requirement — it’s a basic expectation for a white collar worker. We think basic building skills will follow the same trajectory,” he noted.

In a recent survey, GitHub found that most developers using AI see the technology as a game-changer and expect it to write 90% of their code in 2-5 years. More interestingly, instead of feeling threatened, they said they are managing the work of AI (focusing on prompting, delegation, and checks), which has become the new value-add in their role. 

For non-technical users like designers and PMs, on the other hand, tools like v0 will change how they communicate ideas, enabling them to show what exactly they have in their mind through prototypes instead of written documents.

“We say internally, ‘a v0 is worth 1000 words,’ and the idea of someone pitching a product improvement without showing what they’re imagining is almost shocking. V0 is enabling an entirely new way of working,” Hermann said, describing it as a “higher layer of abstraction.”