Many engineers quietly fear that growth in the age of AI means becoming someone they’re not.
That if you stop being the person who writes the hardest code, you’ll be forced to turn into an extrovert, a salesman, or a hype-driven founder. This fear has become louder in the AI era, where tools can now do work that once defined technical identity.
Guillermo Rauch — creator of Next.js and founder of Vercel — is a useful counterexample.
He didn’t abandon engineering.
He expanded it.
He didn’t switch identities — he scaled one
Rauch’s core identity was never “I write a lot of code.”
It was:
I remove friction for builders.
That identity naturally scales.
Early in his career, removing friction meant writing libraries and contributing to Node.js. Later, it meant creating Next.js — a framework that encoded years of hard-won best practices into sensible defaults. Developers didn’t become worse by using it; they shipped faster with fewer footguns.
The work changed, but the motivation stayed the same.
From expert to default-setter
A subtle but important shift happens in Rauch’s story.
Early-stage engineers prove value by knowing more than others. Later-stage technical leaders prove value by deciding what should be known by default.
With Next.js, Rauch moved expertise out of blog posts, conference talks, and tribal knowledge — and into the framework itself. You could still go deep when necessary, but you didn’t have to earn the right to ship.
This wasn’t about lowering standards.
It was about moving standards into the system.
Why this looks like “sales” from the outside
As Vercel grew, Rauch became more visible. He explained ideas publicly, launched products, and talked about direction rather than implementation details.
To some engineers, that looks like becoming a salesman.
But what’s actually happening is different:
- explaining instead of persuading
- clarifying trade-offs instead of hyping features
- setting direction instead of proving competence
That isn’t sales. It’s architecture — applied to people and systems instead of code.
AI didn’t threaten his identity
When AI entered the development workflow, many engineers reacted defensively. They tied their value to difficulty, exclusivity, and time spent solving problems.
Rauch didn’t.
Because his value was already tied to compression and leverage.
v0 follows the same philosophy as Next.js:
- reduce activation energy
- encode best practices
- let humans focus on intent, taste, and judgment
AI wasn’t an identity threat — it was a continuation.
The deeper lesson for engineers
Rauch’s story suggests something uncomfortable but freeing:
Growth doesn’t require becoming louder or more extroverted.
It requires moving up a layer.
From solving problems yourself → to deciding which problems should disappear.
That isn’t a loss of rigor.
It’s engineering at a higher abstraction level.
A personal note
As a career engineer, I felt a similar unease when my work started to feel "easier". Instead of wrestling with complex systems late into the night, I found myself explaining, packaging, and publishing knowledge I already had.
That initially felt uncomfortable...! Rauch’s story helped me see this differently. The discomfort wasn’t a loss of rigor; it was a signal that my contribution had moved up a layer — from solving problems myself to making understanding reusable for others.
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