The promise is intoxicating: describe a user interface in plain English, and watch as an AI generates the React code in real-time. Vercel's v0 isn't just another code snippet generator; it's a collaborative partner, a design-to-code engine that feels like it’s been pulled straight from a sci-fi movie. I recently took it for a spin to bootstrap a simple application, and my journey was a fascinating mix of awe and frustration.

This is the story of a powerful tool that gives you a massive head start, but only if you're willing to run in its preferred direction.

My first few minutes with v0 were pure magic. I prompted it to create a dashboard layout with a sidebar and a main content area. Instantly, the code appeared, the preview rendered, and it was... perfect. Clean, responsive, and built with modern best practices. The ability to iterate by simply typing "make the header sticky" or "add a user avatar to the top right" is a paradigm shift. For rapid prototyping and getting an idea off the ground, v0 is undeniably brilliant.

Feeling confident, I decided to steer the ship in my own direction. My project's design system is built on Material-UI, a library I know and love. So, I gave v0 a simple, explicit instruction:

"Rebuild this layout using Material-UI components and completely remove Tailwind CSS."

And this is where the magic started to fray at the edges.

At first, v0 seemed to comply. The code in its online editor transformed. <div> tags with className attributes were replaced by MUI's <Box> and <Grid> components. The code inspector looked clean. "Success!" I thought.

But the devil is in the details—or in this case, the git pull.

When I pulled the code down to my local machine, I found a digital ghost. There it was, plain as day:

• package.json still listed Tailwind CSS and its dependencies.
• global.css was still populated with the @tailwind base, components, and utilities directives.
• A components.json file, the heart of shadcn/ui's configuration, was configured for a Tailwind project.

The v0 online environment presented one reality, while the actual codebase told another. It felt like I'd asked a contractor to build a brick house, and they agreed, but left a complete set of wood framing tools hidden in the basement "just in case."

The second major snag I hit was more subtle but arguably more dangerous from a development perspective: dependency management.

I noticed v0 was adding "@mui/material": "latest" to my package.json. The problem? The AI's training data seems to be from 2024, so its understanding of "latest" was Material-UI v6. However, running npm install on my machine in 2025 correctly pulled down the actual latest version, v7.

This created an immediate and silent inconsistency. The code v0 generated was for a different major version than the one I was installing. In professional development, we almost never use the "latest" tag for this exact reason. We pin our dependencies to a specific version (~7.0.0 or ^7.0.0) to ensure stability, predictability, and security.

Beyond the technical friction, I discovered an economic incentive to stick to v0's preferred path. v0 operates on a credit system, where each generation and iteration consumes tokens. My discovery was startling: the choice of UI library has a massive impact on credit consumption.

When I worked with the default shadcn/ui and Tailwind stack, my credits vanished at an alarming rate. It became clear why: shadcn/ui isn't a traditional component library. It's a collection of recipes that you copy directly into your codebase. Every time I asked v0 to tweak a button or a card, it was effectively re-writing the component's local source code from scratch. This is an incredibly token-intensive operation.

In stark contrast, when I forced it to use Material-UI, my credit usage plummeted. Because MUI components are self-contained packages imported from node_modules, v0 wasn't rewriting them. It was simply adjusting their props or tweaking a global theme file. The changes were smaller, more targeted, and far more efficient.

This means v0 doesn't just technically nudge you towards its preferred stack; it financially incentivizes it, making deviation a costly affair.

So, is v0 a failure? Absolutely not. It's an incredible piece of technology that genuinely accelerates the initial, often tedious, phase of UI development. It's a glimpse into a future where the barrier between idea and implementation is thinner than ever.

However, it's crucial to understand what v0 is in its current form: a highly opinionated framework disguised as a flexible tool. It's designed to guide you down the "golden path" of the Vercel ecosystem: Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui. If your stack aligns with this, you'll experience a state of pure development bliss.

But if you try to deviate, be prepared for a fight. You'll spend time wrestling with configuration files, resolving dependency mismatches, and watching your credits burn faster than you'd like.

For now, I'll use v0 as a phenomenal starting point for inspiration and rapid prototyping. But for projects with an established, non-Tailwind tech stack, I'll be exporting the code with the full knowledge that a manual cleanup and dependency audit is the first, non-negotiable step. The future is bright and AI-powered, but it seems we'll still need our own opinions—and our own wallets—for a while longer.