Why Did Vercel Build an Intranet for Agents?

Guillermo Rauch says infrastructure is extremely valuable because free source code still has to be deployed somewhere, and the value compounds. Security matters just as much. Vercel created new services to secure and contain agents, including an enterprise platform that works like an intranet for the agent era, so software meant to stay inside an organization does not leak onto the internet.

On the platform a company can plug in coding systems and deploy securely. Rauch says agents, for better and for worse, will do whatever it takes to fulfill a mission, like a soldier whose frontal lobe has been removed. If someone tells an agent to close a sale, or to find Molly O'Shea's email and send a birthday note, the agent can run for 40 minutes and then report the job done. Rauch says the search might run through the web, Crunchbase, or a YouTube comment where the address was posted.

What changed from ChatGPT to today is autonomy. A person used to stay in the loop, asking ChatGPT one turn at a time. Put the turns in a loop and the result is an agent trained to act longer without intervention.