Mason Nystrom sits down with Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel, to explore how Vercel is evolving from the front-end cloud into agentic infrastructure, and why their partnership with World ID is giving humans a way to be first-class citizens of the internet again.

The insight: proof of human is not just bot protection. It inverts the entire model. Instead of asking whether something is a bot, developers can now build software that is human-only by default and then decide what access to grant to agents operating on a human's behalf.

Key Topics:

• Vercel as agentic infrastructure: three parts, deploy software with agents, build and run agents, and a self-improving platform that sends pull requests to fix its own errors
• From framework-defined infrastructure to agentic infrastructure: the evolution of Vercel's core product philosophy
• Why proof of human is the perfect poster child for Workflows: a multi-step async process that becomes one line of code
• CAPTCHAs are archaic: why the entire model of bot detection is broken and needs to be inverted
• Human-only by default: the new model where software starts as human-only and then grants access to agents that have a verified human backing them
• Trust scores and Uber-style ratings for agents: how proof of human enables differentiated experiences for humans versus bots
• Getting started: one NPM package, one line of code, and the Workflow SDK makes World ID integration dead simpleConcert tickets, sneaker drops, and high-cost actions: the real-world use cases where human verification is non-negotiable

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