Can AI copy
Vercel
Push a branch, get a URL, with the servers left as an exercise for somebody else.
Nice try
- Verdict
- Nice try
- Time to copy
- you won't
- Category
- ▚ Infrastructure
- Source
- Proprietary
The prompt
Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.
Do not build a hosting platform. Build the useful 5 per cent for yourself: a service that receives a git webhook, runs a build in an isolated container, uploads the artefact to object storage, and serves it behind a per-branch preview subdomain with automatic TLS. Add a deployment history with instant rollback by repointing the alias. That is a genuinely good internal tool. The other 95 per cent is a datacentre strategy.
What copies cleanly
- The dashboard, the deployment list, the log viewer, the environment variable editor.
- A git webhook that runs a build in a container and serves the output. That is a real and satisfying weekend project.
- Preview URLs per branch, which is a subdomain and a routing table.
Where it stops
- A global edge network with anycast routing, TLS certificate issuance per custom domain at scale, and cache invalidation across every point of presence.
- Build isolation for untrusted code from thousands of tenants, which is a security posture rather than a feature.
- Cold-start performance, which is the entire competitive surface and is measured in milliseconds nobody hands you.
- Being on call for other people's production at three in the morning.
What actually protects them
- Capital expenditure and network peering agreements.
- The framework relationship, where the deployment target and the framework are designed together.
- Reliability history, which cannot be acquired faster than time passes.
Editor's note
Included partly because this site is deployed on it, which felt like the honest thing to disclose on an index about copying people.
Go and look at the original
We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.
Next in the index
- 1PasswordA vault for the secrets that unlock everything else you own.Nice try
- CraigslistClassified ads, in blue underlined text, largely unchanged since the last century.Nice try
- FigmaA design tool that runs in a browser and lets a room full of people edit the same file at once.Nice try
- GitHubGit, plus the social layer that made everyone agree on where the code lives.Nice try