people · May 22, 2026
Vercel Labs releases Zero, experimental systems programming language for AI agents
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Vercel Labs engineer Chris Tate released Zero, a systems programming language designed for AI agents as primary users, on or around May 15-16, 2026. Zero features explicit effects in function signatures, JSON-native diagnostics with stable error codes and typed repair metadata, and compiles to sub-10 KiB native binaries with predictable memory and control flow. The project reached roughly 1,500 GitHub stars shortly after launch with v0.1.1 as the latest release by mid-May 2026; Vercel CTO Malte Ubl shared a Bun rewrite experiment achieving 98.7% test pass rate in about 22 hours. Zero builds on prior Vercel agent efforts including skills.sh launched in January 2026 that reached over 20,000 installations within hours.