To address the limitations of previous tools and frameworks for serverless Node.js functions on Vercel, a new set of default helper methods has been introduced, providing direct access to request and response payload properties, improving performance compared to basic Express.js applications. The helpers include request.query, request.cookies, request.body, response.status(), response.json(), and response.send(). These enhancements enable developers to parse GET parameters and cookies with ease, automatically parse request bodies regardless of format, and define response status codes and send outgoing responses with a single method call. With these updates, users can streamline their code without requiring changes on their side, and the list of available helpers is expected to grow in the future.