Frontend development company Vercel is releasing a new tool that uses generative AI to help developers quickly create new website and user interface (UI) components.
Called v0, the new tool enables you to use plain text prompts to describe what you want and then receive a component generated based on your request.
“With v0, we’re introducing a new concept to the world, one that embraces the power of generative AI specifically for web development. We’re calling it Generative UI (genUI). GenUI refers to using AI models—specifically language learning models (LLMs)—to generate frontend code. This code can then be integrated directly into your application, where you can continue to iterate and build off of a solid foundation,” Vercel said.
Once you submit your prompt, v0 provides three choices of user interfaces it has generated. Then, you can choose the one you want by copy+pasting its code into your application. If it’s not quite what you’re looking for, you will also have the option to make alterations until it is what you wanted.
The website currently offers example components based on various sample prompts, including a contact form, a cookie consent banner, and a hero section in dark mode.
According to Vercel, v0 was trained on custom code, open-source datasets, and synthetic datasets, and not on any Vercel customer data or code. It also uses users’ prompts and contexts to further refine the model. “Using this data gives Vercel the ability to provide more accurate and relevant recommendations to our users,” the tool’s FAQ states.
During its private alpha period, it gained 100k signups over the course of three weeks. Now the tool is in beta and there is a waitlist for developers looking to experiment with it.
