A better Vercel for AI generated internal apps

In June, we began taking purposeful steps to separate Major the agent from Major the platform. Today, you can use the Major platform as a standalone service! In this article, I will detail the shortcomings of Vercel for building internal tools and why you should host your AI generated code on Major.

How teams are building with Vercel

Let me paint you a picture.

You're a customer support manager trying to build an agent that reviews daily customer activity and summarizes it in a dashboard. Claude built you a demo by pulling yesterday's activity into a CSV, processing it into a second CSV with the results, and rendering the whole thing as a local artifact. Your boss loves it. Your team loves it. You get the green light to build it for real.

What do you do next?

You remember a presentation a few weeks back where someone in engineering mentioned they'd built a project so folks could vibecode apps. So you message that person. They send you a Notion doc.

• Install git ("What or who is git?")
• Pull the internal-projects repo. ("What's a repo? What's an SSH key?")
• Run create-new-app in your terminal. ("Failed — node is not installed.")
• Create and connect a Vercel project ("How do I do that? Do I even have permissions?")
• Create a new Vercel deployment. ("I don't have a login.")
• Ask IT for a connector API token ("How do I use an API token?")

And on, and on, and on.

A motivated person makes it to step three before calling for help. Your average employee reads the doc, closes it, pulls the CSV by hand, and sends their boss a screenshot.

Vercel is a genuinely powerful tool. It was built to serve consumer web apps with 100MM daily users, not your team's internal dashboard.

What Major Does

Major allows you to deploy apps, agents and workflows that are built locally from your computer. You can use any agent harness, IDE or interface to build - Cowork, Grok Bot, or Claude Code all work.

We do this through sandboxes that you're able to connect to via MCP. Within the sandboxes is a fully loaded development environment (git, node, dev server, installed dependencies). Your local agent communicates with the sandbox to build. Every development environment is able to connect to your centralized connectors that you set up in the Major platform so you can access your most used SaaS tools immediately. End users do not have to connect their own connectors.

When you're done building, you can deploy and share with simple google docs-style controls. Major serves as a catalog of your org's artifacts. When onboarding new members of the team, you can add them to user groups where they receive the full suite of artifacts that your team has built to automate work.

Our three artifact types (apps, agents and workflows) work seamlessly together and augment each other. All three are run in a robust, durable way so that you can focus on functionality and not uptime.

Vercel is not built for this

There are several reasons we see teams switch over from a homegrown Vercel solution into Major specifically for their internal tooling.

1. Auth as a first class citizen

For AI-generated applications to be trusted in production, authentication and authorization cannot be left up to the generated code.

Vercel Authentication can put a login wall in front of a deployment, but its authorization model is fundamentally about access to a Vercel deployment. Vercel also has project-level roles on Enterprise, but those determine what developers can do to the underlying Vercel project - not what employees can do inside the application. None of these solutions provide identifying information to your applications to allow for user-specific experiences.

Major treats application permissions as a first-class citizen. Every application has viewers and editors. A viewer can use the application; an editor can modify it. Those permissions can be assigned to individual users or groups imported from your IdP, just like Google Docs.

This means Finance can edit one application, Sales can view another, and the rest of the company can have no access at all - without the generated application containing a line of authentication or authorization code.

2. Connector access is centrally managed

Connections to your internal systems are crucial for any internal app to be actually useful. There are several ways we've seen teams try to get around this on Vercel - MCP gateways, floating API keys - all are insecure, a headache to manage and not auditable.

On Major, you connect your connectors in one central place. We support databases, CRMs, ERPs and thousands of other connectors. In one place, you manage who can build with the connectors and who can just view them.

All your builders are then able to integrate the connectors directly in their apps, agents and workflows without having to go to IT for an API Token.

Auditing is built in

Because we centrally manage connectors, we also centrally audit log how people are using each of the connectors. This is especially important with agents that can perform write commands into production systems.

3. Apps, Agents and Workflows are connected

Vercel has applications, agents and durable workflows, but they remain largely separate developer primitives. If an application wants to use an agent, or a workflow wants to coordinate several pieces of software, a developer still has to express that relationship in code and wire the pieces together.

Major is built around a different abstraction: apps, agents and workflows are atomic artifacts that can be composed directly with one another.

An app can call an agent. An agent can be dropped into a workflow. A workflow can invoke an existing app. Each artifact can be built, deployed, permissioned, evaluated and improved independently, and then reused as a building block somewhere else.

Workflows make this particularly clear. For example, one workflow that Major runs internally:

• Gets triggered when a user signs up
• Calls an existing app to determine whether the user is already in our CRM
• If not, invokes an agent that determines whether the company fits our ICP
• If it does, sends a message to Slack and adds the user to our high-value signup tracker app, where the BDR team can send an email or award free credits

Every piece is independently useful software. The ICP agent can be developed and evaluated on its own. The signup tracker remains a standalone application. Everything is orchestrated by our workflow executor.

4. Sandboxes!

You do not need a Rust backend for your Finance dashboard. The Major platform chooses a single web framework which allows us to spin up fully loaded sandboxes for you to use. As your codebase evolves, you do not have to maintain your local environment. Secrets and env variables are completely abstracted away and outside of your local environment.

This also allows us to get around git for non-technical users. Everything is enclosed within our sandboxes, the only thing you need to bring is your agent.

5. Built for both technical and non-technical users

Vercel is hard to use for non-technical users. Typically, you'll have to set up a Github repo, CI/CD process, and then configure a bunch of little knobs to get it to work for your team. What's worse is there's a continuous overhead of educating people on how to develop on it correctly. Vercel's core user for the past 11 years has been engineers who want to configure their DNS settings for every environment, their CI/CD rules, the way every part of their site is delivered through Vercel's CDN. Most companies only have one project deployed on Vercel, their core app. This functionality is great for engineers, but has exactly all the knobs someone in Strategic Finance, for example, doesn't want.

Major has sensible defaults geared toward internal apps with centralized knobs that IT/Engineering can configure. Auth is opt out not opt in, DNS is as easy as setting a name and error monitoring, logging and auto-scaling are all built in defaults that you don't need to worry about. For non-technical users, it means that they can go from idea to sharing an app with their team in minutes. For technical users, it means they can ship that internal dashboard their support team needs without having to setup Google login (or god-forbid, SSO).

It's not that Vercel can't do all of the above well, it's that it relies on every user to know how to do it. Major draws the right boundaries and allows you to focus on building things that will further your business.

Try Major Today

You can create an account on app.major.build and start building directly with the MCP (https://mcp.major.build/mcp/build).

We recommend DM'ing us for free credits and a guided onboarding!