v0 by Vercel Review: AI-Generated React Components That Actually Ship

I opened v0, typed "a settings page with profile editing, notification preferences, and a connected accounts section," and watched it generate a fully functional three-tab settings interface in under 40 seconds. The component used shadcn/ui primitives, Tailwind utility classes, and TypeScript types — the exact stack I would have chosen if I had written it from scratch. I copied the code, pasted it into my Next.js project, changed two import paths, and it rendered correctly on the first try. This is the v0 value proposition distilled: generate UI components that look like a senior frontend developer wrote them, then paste them into your real project without rewriting half the output. After generating 15 components across two weeks of real product work, I can confirm that v0 delivers on this promise more reliably than any general-purpose AI coding tool I have tested. But its scope is narrower than the marketing suggests, and understanding where v0 stops being useful is as important as knowing where it excels. The shadcn/ui Advantage v0 is built on top of shadcn/ui, and this is the single most important fact about how it works. shadcn/ui is not a component library in the traditional sense — it is a collection of copy-pasteable React components built on Radix UI primitives with Tailwind styling. When v0 generates a component, it uses these primitives directly, which means the output is consistent, accessible, and composable. The practical benefit is that v0-generated components integrate with your existing project without introducing a new design system. If you already use shadcn/ui — and a large and growing percentage of Next.js projects do — the generated components reuse your existing Button, Card, Dialog, and Input primitives. v0 just assumes you have them installed and generates code that expects them. If you do not have shadcn/ui in your project, v0 prompts you to run the initialization command before generating anything, which takes about 30 seconds. This archite