953: Why v0 creator left Vercel to fix GitHub (GOAT Jared Palmer)

Scott and Wes sit down with Jared Palmer of GitHub (formerly of Vercel) to unpack all the biggest announcements from GitHub Universe 2025. They dive into the future of developer workflows with agents, how GitHub is rethinking project interfaces, and where there’s still room to improve the dev experience. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! GitHub Universe Recap. 00:21 Who is Jared Palmer? 01:19 The developer workflow with agents. 03:33 Opening ongoing tasks in VS Code. 06:08 The benefit of agnostic agents. 07:04 GitHub’s biggest opportunities for improvement. 09:38 What’s your interface of choice for a new project? Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Hi, man. Hey, Jared.

• 0:02Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you.

• 0:03Wes Bos?

  How's it going? Thanks a lot for coming out.

• 0:05Speaker 02

  Thanks for the quick response.

• 0:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:08Scott Tolinski?

  Great to see you. No, I don't think so.

• 0:09Wes Bos?

  We just finished recording our recap and I was like, oh, I checked my DMs.

• 0:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:15Wes Bos?

  Just there, it's fine, I think. Yeah.

• 0:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, anywhere you want.

• 0:18Wes Bos?

  What's up, everybody? We got Jared Palmer in the house today. We're at GitHub Universe. Always nice to pull him in. Jared just popped in and we're stoked to talk to him. You recently started a job at Microsoft slash GitHub and are fixing all the problems. What's going on?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I don't know about all the problems.

• 0:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm doing my best.

• 0:37Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I'm like, it's like day 13, 14.

• 0:41Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna say, yeah, it feels like it's fresh.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  It's fresh.

• 0:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  So I'm still acclimating.

• 0:47Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of shared DNA between, previously I was at Vercel.

• 0:52Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  And Giserrimo, the CEO of Vercel, and Nat Friedman are very close friends. And Nat used to be the CEO of GitHub. And so it's a lot there. It's a lot of corporate DNA.

• 1:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  That has permeated through the evolution of the companies. And so, and there's been a lot of former GitHubers that came to Vercel.

• 1:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  And so that's, it's, there's hints of similarity, if that makes sense.

• 1:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Still getting acclimated.

• 1:18Wes Bos?

  Totally. That's awesome. So you're the creator of V0, right?

• 1:22Speaker 02

  I am.

• 1:23Wes Bos?

  I'm curious to get your thought on just workflow in general with this type of stuff. So developers listening to this podcast, we saw all these new tools be announced today. You obviously have a lot of experience in the V0, whereas it happens in the browser. And then at some point, you bring that out of there. Like, what are your thoughts on what the developer workflow will look like with all these agents?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think...

• 1:51Speaker 02

  That we need to do a better job as a community, building out like continuity, if you will, right?

• 1:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Remember, it still feels like, remember before, it still feels like maybe, I'm gonna date myself, in high school, when you worked on a work, we didn't really have like Dropbox, right? And like the pre Dropbox days. I know that it's like dating myself, it does kind of feel like that, where you're so isolated.

• 2:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  They're not fluid, there's no continuity, your flow state gets broken, you you start one task and you go off, you you kind of forget.

• 2:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Wes Bos?

  It's called final.js.

• 2:25Scott Tolinski?

  Drive and drop.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Underscore, underscore, final, final.

• 2:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, totally.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  So, so anyway, so I think that in the future, and ideally, one of the things I'm focused on is bringing continuity across all of the the Microsoft, if you will, touchpoints, which is like, and that's what's been so important about this reorganization around the core AI unit, which is Visual Studio, VS Code, GitHub, and Azure AI Foundry.

• 2:55Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  And parts of Azure 2. And the idea here is that like, we should be working really tightly with the VS Code team at GitHub, and we should be making handoff super seamless.

• 3:04Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Right?

• 3:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  And so when you start tasks in one, you should be able to pick them up on the other and vice versa, and you're seeing that today. And the other thing is that model choice is real. And I think developers want that choice, they always want to use the bleeding edge, and so that's one of the announcements we had today, that we're bringing third-party models to GitHub Copilot and GitHub Agent HQ, which is the new control plane from which you can kick off kind of background tasks and work through PRs and other things like that. So I'm really excited about that future. And then, I don't know if you caught it in the in the keynote, if you do start a task in Agent HQ or on GitHub, you can open that in VS Code.

• 3:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that that was the killer thing to me.

• 3:43Scott Tolinski?

  I think that was the most encouraging new feature shown today, just because like we were saying, it's like so many times when those responses come back, if it's unusable at that point, you're like, okay, now I'm.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  You're stuck.

• 3:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah, let me scrap this.

• 3:54Scott Tolinski?

  Or I'll scrap it entirely.

• 3:55Wes Bos?

  Let me type in the box again and let it go run for 15 minutes and then come back to it. And you you lose that flow state.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Totally. One of the things that I did testing that feature, so last week, NextJS announced version 16.

• 4:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Very exciting, you guys probably covered it, if you didn't, whatever. But.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I was excited.

• 4:12Scott Tolinski?

  Scott's a huge Next fan, so yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so the first thing I did was, and I thought this was pretty cool, because one of the cool things about AGN HQ is the prompt is actually set up to create PRs, which is a little different than like the VS Code, super interactive, fast twitch, if you will, like cursor.

• 4:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Not background image, but like cursor sidebar situation.

• 4:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  The prompt that I gave was, "Research the latest Next JS 16 release and upgrade guide, then run all the code mods and upgrade my, my site." And it just did it. And like, and it created five different commits, it created a draft PR, and it did take, I think it took a, it's like 10 minutes, but that's okay. But it did it, and then it ran all the, it not only did that, it ran all five code mods, migrated from Next Lint to the new ES Lint CLI, and it verified, it migrated to turbopack, changed configuration, validated the builds, even included like now built in nine seconds of turbopack. Anyway, I guess to a point where like, I don't think a year ago, we were at this.

• 5:13Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:14Wes Bos?

  No, a year ago, we were sitting in this podcast booth, talking about like better tab completion.

• 5:18Scott Tolinski?

  Or tab completion at all, yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  It's kind of amazing, right? And so, anyway, to your point, though, if that PR is like 80% ready.

• 5:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  And we don't have an escape hatch.

• 5:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's just like so much product pressure on us to like, right? So this new open in VS Code feature, I'm very bullish on because it just keeps you in the flow, right?

• 5:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  It's kind of like horseshoes and hand grenades. We only need to get a little, we kind of need to get close.

• 5:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  So I'm very excited about that.

• 5:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, me personally, I think that's the thing I'll probably end up using the most beyond bringing in Claude or any of these things, because I was always assigning things to Copilot out of issues right now. But being able, like you said, model choice is important, and now it's, it's less of, hey, I'm assigning it to Copilot, and I'm assigning it to what I'm used to, I'm assigning it to what my flow is.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is great. I think that's awesome.

• 6:07Wes Bos?

  And the, being able to use Claude code, or Codax, or whatever agent you want, like, you could talk about kind of the background of, of behind that as well, being having some choice.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's important that we. From my short Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, thirteen days, yeah. Yeah, but obviously, like, I talked to Satya before joining and we had talked about some of the these, these big decisions, right, for the platform. Yeah. Whether we should allow third parties and stuff like that. And we both agreed, I think, it seems like this past, at least like, three to six months have shown that like, giving model choice is what developers want. It is, ultimately leads to the best product. And, you know, if you're talking about GitHub's mission, which is to empower developers to build awesome stuff, well, then, like, yeah, they should have model choice. It's kind of a no-brainer. And we'll do well if we stay true to the community. Yeah. And focus on developers, and everything else will take care of itself.

• 7:01Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's great, that's great. So, once you got hired, you went on a tear on Twitter.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I've been throwing heaters. Yeah, I love it, yes.

• 7:10Wes Bos?

  What can we fix? How can we do it? So, are you just like, coming in and fixing all the rendering issues? Or like, you have like, a pretty, not aggressive, but like,

• 7:20Speaker 02

  No nonsense, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:22Wes Bos?

  You're good at getting shit done, right? Obviously, Vercel was like that as well.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, thank you.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  I, a couple of things. I think that feedback is a gift.

• 7:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  And we've got such passionate developers in this community, and they have such awesome opinions.

• 7:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  That like, sometimes you've just gotta ask, like, how can we make GitHub pull? I don't think, I don't know of any time anybody from GitHub has asked that on X. Like, how do we make GitHub pull requests better?

• 7:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Right, so, but like, how else will you know? Right, and it turned out that the top ask was stack, stack diffs.

• 7:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Right? Which I kinda knew was coming, but, I was, I was, um, and I did, I did ask, I can get into that in a second, but I'll answer that after. But, no, you know, I've got a lot to learn, it's my, you know, thirteenth, fourteenth day here.

• 8:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Um, and GitHub is a, um, a very, I don't know, it's, it's, it's like a legendary product, let me say that. Yeah, it's an institution. Right, it's an institution, right? So, we're not gonna, we're not gonna, so change is coming in the sense that like, we want to make sure that we are evolving with the times and building the best possible developer experience we can.

• 8:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  And I think that's gonna also change because, just like we discussed just a couple of minutes ago. Like we went from autocomplete to like if an almost like a coworker.

• 8:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah, robots going off and doing work.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Or an intern, let's call it an intern.

• 8:39Wes Bos?

  Fire it off from your phone.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Right, like that's just different. So like, and also it's going to require a different workflow. And so some of the stuff needs to evolve with that new workflow. And we're committed to like seeing that vision through. And so I think about what does it look like? What is, what is a pull request in 2027? And I don't know the answer yet, but I'm pretty sure Giddo is gonna have to answer that question.

• 8:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's gonna, it might look a little bit different.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Might look a little bit different and that's exciting. And I think that's what we're, we're driving and focusing, if that makes sense.

• 9:05Wes Bos?

  That's cool.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  And then also to the performance side, like this is something that's near and dear to my heart. And so we're also working on that too. That's been in the works, but I'm really excited about the team and the stuff that I've seen so far, so.

• 9:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but now you get to show up and take credit, right? Because that's your, your thing.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Right, show up and take credit. Exactly. I contributed to not as much as you could expect for, for this, but I'm very happy and proud of the team. They put in a lot of effort. A lot of the stuff you're seeing today was started months and months ago, obviously. And so happy to cheerlead, but also like deferential to the team.

• 9:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  They, they kick butt.

• 9:36Wes Bos?

  All right, last question. You need to build something. What's your interface? Where are you starting? Are you starting in, in B zero in a browser? Are you NPM scaffolding something? Are you kicking off an agent?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  What are we building?

• 9:50Wes Bos?

  You're building a podcast player website.

• 9:55Scott Tolinski?

  Les is asking for personal reasons here. He wants to know where to start.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  What, what, what are you guys? What would you use right now?

• 10:01Wes Bos?

  For me, I, I would NPM scaffold out something so that I have my like basics, you know? Like I have them in place, maybe get Viet and everything running.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Would you do that by hand?

• 10:12Wes Bos?

  I would, I usually do that by hand because way too often it picks the wrong tech.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And would you like install chat, like chat C N or like?

• 10:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, I install all the depths that I decide I want.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:22Wes Bos?

  Which I know was, was part of the announcements today as well, which is planning mode. Once I have that, I'll, I head into like the agent tab and start kind of going back and forth with, with agents. And it scaffolds it out and I kind of talk back and forth to it. So that's my UI, but I'm always curious about like, I do that because like I'm a, I was a developer before this stuff. And that's what I'm comfortable with. But I'm also curious, like people who are not necessarily, or not that you're not a developer, obviously you are. But people who are, are new to this stuff, like what does their UI look like? And I'm always curious to see what people.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  What do I use?

• 10:55Wes Bos?

  Tackle, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  What would you start with?

• 10:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I use Svelte for everything. So I start with like SV. There's a number of options, boilerplates and stuff that get going.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Is SV the Svelte CLI?

• 11:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. And so you couldn't even get database and all that stuff going right from there.

• 11:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Shout out to Rich.

• 11:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And by the time you're done with that, the CLI, you have oh, pretty much everything like ORM, everything configured, database, you have your containers all set up and just from there, that's when I'll hit and go into a planning mode. I'm a little bit more on the over engineer on the like spec driven mode myself. So I'll start getting into specs and then go from there. But yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to answer the podcast question, I think I would do the same thing. I think I would start out with like my I would scaffold.

• 11:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  An XJS app biased, slightly biased. I would, but you know, SSR, it's important.

• 11:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  I would get like like biome setup and like, like everything like to that level.

• 11:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Does that make sense? I would install ShadCN. I probably would pre-install the subset of the components that I thought would be useful in the UI. I actually did this, by the way, this is a specific question for the old undefined side.

• 12:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I use that sometimes. It does like a sort of demo thing. And like I actually migrated, it hadn't touched the site in so long. So it was in Gatsby. And I did the migration to Next. And what I did was, I think the Tailwind guys did a podcast template in one of their.

• 12:31Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Which I bought, but then I copied that thing into a folder.

• 12:36Wes Bos?

  Tailwind UI, yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. I copied that into a folder. I downloaded a folder and then I was like, you know, look at this folder. But one thing I'll give as a tip for those who are prompting, doesn't matter what, which one of these agents you use, a trick that, I actually picked this up from the Claude Code team that works really, really well is to Prompt even before you either write a spec

• 13:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Or actually go to execute is to ask the model to do some research.

• 13:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  It's so powerful.

• 13:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's been powerful for me and even like getting into like database design or those types of things to pre research.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Like go research this.

• 13:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Like get a sense of my code, even that, those two prompts, go research this and get a sense of the code base or paste in a bunch of links and get context. Packing that context can be so powerful and then either, you know, write a plan. There are all some special keywords, by the way, for a lot of these models. I don't know if you guys know this.

• 13:31Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Okay, so have you heard of Ultrathink?

• 13:35Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, yes.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so you can say Ultrathink and that forces usually force, at least in the anthropic models will force like high reasoning.

• 13:41Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Another sort of secret tip I'll share, which I've found useful, some like emergent behavior is if you ask these models to add logs and assert statements, which is like low key, like not many people use these days, but add assert statements and logs to maximize debuggability.

• 14:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  That will, that can sometimes, that can be very helpful when you go to like hit it out. And the third one that I found interesting, and this has helped me with planning, when I'm getting it to write a spec, I'll often put that in a markdown file like to do or plan and sort of ephemeral. And I think we need to develop as a community like a better way of doing this.

• 14:16Scott Tolinski?

  Absolutely.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  It's so kind of out there.

• 14:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  But like, maybe that's beautiful, but it's kind of, it just seems like not right. It's, it seems like.

• 14:24Scott Tolinski?

  I've like redone my own custom, you know, spec flow like eight times.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's some, there's like some spec, I don't know, figuring it out, but let's just put it in a markdown file.

• 14:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  But then what I do is I ask it to create a rubric for grading the spec or this plan. Then grade it.

• 14:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Then revise it.

• 14:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  And that extra step of like it thinking through the rubric and then self evaluating, I've found to be quite useful. But it can go overboard and so it ends up like, I've probably seen this too. It's like week one to two, week three to four.

• 14:57Scott Tolinski?

  Absolutely.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  I haven't figured out how to get it to stop planning like 12 weeks.

• 15:00Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  What is that about?

• 15:02Scott Tolinski?

  We did like a vibe, vibe.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 15:04Scott Tolinski?

  What is that?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:05Scott Tolinski?

  How do I get it out?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we were seeing who could get it done the fastest. Like, oh, can we get this done in 10 minutes? And then it was like, okay, week one. I'm like, no.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Why does it do that?

• 15:16Wes Bos?

  No, stop. That and like the yapping at the end where it tells you what it did. You gotta tell it, stop yapping.

• 15:24Scott Tolinski?

  Stop.

• 15:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Just give me the code.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So funny. But yeah, so if I could figure out how to not have it make a 12 week plan.

• 15:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  That would be great. And I'm too lazy to like, correct it.

• 15:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no, you're just like, yeah, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Maybe it's good. I don't know. But so that's my, some of my tips. The Rubrik thing is helpful. Uh, Ultra thing is helpful. And then I would, and then from there, what I'm really excited about now is with some of these, I don't think Claude Code can do this yet, but I think, but I know that VS Code can do this. I think, um, I saw something, Cursor's gonna have this very soon too, which is the ability to have like N attempts or variants at the same prompt.

• 15:59Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Just, you know, throw, throw money.

• 16:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah. Just run them all way in like, like branches or something like that?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  I think they, yeah, yeah. Work trees. Um, I think that's, I mean, yeah, like, let's just, you know.

• 16:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Fire three of them up, hopefully one hits.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, let the interns do it.

• 16:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So.

• 16:19Wes Bos?

  Hedging your code.

• 16:20Scott Tolinski?

  Put a team on it.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Put a team on that. Anyway, so I think, I think that those are my like, that's what I, that's what I would do for a podcast.

• 16:25Scott Tolinski?

  Hell, yeah.

• 16:26Wes Bos?

  Awesome. Well, appreciate your time.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:28Wes Bos?

  This was really good. I'm glad you can make it.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Likewise. Big fan. It's finally great to meet IRL in the flesh.

• 16:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  See you guys around and, uh, happy to come on again.

• 16:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, sick. Anytime.

• 16:39Wes Bos?

  All right, thanks.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Peace.