Building production AI agents with the Vercel AI SDK
Streaming, tool calling, structured output, and provider routing — the patterns I use to ship real AI products on the Vercel AI SDK, not just demos.
The Vercel AI SDK gives you one typed interface for streaming, tool calling, and structured output across providers. When the goal is shipping a product fast — which is a lot of what I do — that consistency matters more than squeezing the last 5% out of any single model.
Patterns that hold up
- Stream everything. Users forgive latency they can watch happen.
- Tools over prompts. Give the model real functions to call; don’t coax behavior with prose.
- Structured output. When you need data back, schema-validate it instead of parsing free text.
- Route through the gateway. Model fallbacks and a single billing surface beat hard-coding one provider.
In practice
BuildLog runs all of its generation on the AI SDK — turning a team’s commits, PRs, and releases into draft social posts you review and publish. The same patterns carry straight over to agent products: the SDK handles the model plumbing so your time goes to the product, not the provider quirks.