Vercel's Andrew Qu on why agents are a new kind of software

Latent Space · 3 months ago · 5

Andrew Qu, Chief of Software at Vercel, argues that agents represent a fundamentally different category of software from web applications because they require different primitives for handling dynamic interactions, context management, and long-running work. Vercel built eve, its agent framework, after discovering that existing tools couldn't solve specific problems it encountered building agents internally, such as switching between AI models, adding fallbacks, and making runs resumable. The company now treats agents as a core platform capability rather than a separate product, embedding them into its website, Slack, and dashboard to perform tasks on behalf of users.