What happens when you're too stubborn to pay $3,000 for a JavaScript Gantt chart? You build your own composable UI library. And then Vercel acquires it. 😅

In this episode, I'm joined by Hayden Bleasel — DX Engineer at Vercel and the mind behind Kibo UI, next-forge, Streamdown, AI Elements, and a bunch of other open source tools you've probably already used.

We get into the real stories — like how he rage-converted five separate repos into a Turborepo monorepo in the back of an Uber flying down the German Autobahn 🚗💨, how next-forge started as "nobody's gonna use this" and ended up getting acquired, and why he refuses to charge for templates when everyone else is selling $149 Next.js boilerplates.

We also talk about the stuff that's keeping every developer up at night — AI agents maintaining their own codebases (Streamdown is literally too complex for a human now), the explosion of skills in AI workflows, vibe coding gone wrong (dynamic imports in the middle of functions, anyone?), and whether learning frameworks even matters anymore.

Whether you're deep into the Next.js ecosystem or just trying to figure out where web dev is headed — this one's packed.

🔗 Links:
Kibo UI: https://kibo-ui.com
Next-forge: https://www.next-forge.com
AI Elements: https://elements.ai-sdk.dev
Hayden on X: https://x.com/haydenbleasel

🕐 Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro & how we met
5:00 - Who is Hayden Bleasel
7:00 - The story behind Kibo UI
11:00 - Where the name "Kibo" comes from
12:00 - Open source journey & Ultrasight
15:00 - Biome vs ESLint vs OXLint
18:00 - The Turborepo Autobahn conversion story
21:00 - How Nextforge was born & acquired by Vercel
24:00 - Why he gives everything away for free
31:00 - AI Elements: ShadCN UI for AI
33:00 - Streamdown & agent-maintained code
39:00 - Skills: the new frontier for AI agents
43:00 - Does learning frameworks still matter?
47:00 - Vibe coding: what happens when AI takes the wheel
50:00 - Next.js 16 & caching
53:00 - What's next

💬 Drop a comment if you want us to do a follow-up where we actually build something with AI Elements and Streamdown — Hayden's already down for it.

#nextjs #vercel #opensource #react #aiagents #webdevelopment #turborepo #kiboui

Hamed Bahram

Hayden Blaylock, DX engineer at Vercel, shares his journey building open source libraries like Kibbo UI (a Shadcn registry for complex components), Next Forge (a Turbo Repo template acquired by Vercel), and Ultrasite (a strict linter/formatter preset). He discusses his philosophy of providing free, composable tools while exploring monetization through hosted services. Now at Vercel, he maintains AI Elements and Streamdown, helping developers build AI interfaces. The conversation covers his transition from frustration-driven development to working on AI SDK tooling, his thoughts on skills vs MCP, and how AI agents are changing software development while fundamentals still matter.

He built open source libraries that got acquired by Vercel