Vercel - BotId, partial prerendering, etc.

I won a contest and the prize was a trip to New York City for Vercel Ship. I could write a lot more about the experience as a whole, but here are some of my code-related learnings:

• I watched them launch new features like fluid compute, concurrent builds, and BotId.
• Partial Prerendering seems like a great way to make sites more performant. It reminds me of Astro Islands.
• I learned more about Answer Engine Optimization, which is basically SEO for LLMs. There’s a proposed standard for feeding content to LLMs, similar to robots.txt, called llms.txt. You can programmatically generate them using a tool that Vercel has or a homegrown script. The concept of using AI to generate a llms.txt file for other AIs is kind of funny to me, but I can see how it’d be useful. I missed the beginning of this talk, so I’m actually not sure how big of an advantage this is over using semantic HTML and other SEO-boosting HTML/framework features.
• I went to a workshop on building eCommerce sites with Next.js and thought the idea of using Partial Prerendering to rearrange PDPs based on UTM parameters or cookies (around 30:00) was smart.
• I saw a cool demo on building agentic experiences with Vercel’s AI SDK.