Vercel Ship 2025 workshop: Building agents with the AI SDK (Nico Albanese)

[Music] [Applause] hello everyone how's everyone doing good having fun all right so this is the building agents with the AI SDK workshop I'm really excited oh yep we're all up here throughout the session if things are really small on the screen like let me know i can bump things up a bit but we're also gonna have a companion site throughout so you'll have you'll be able to look at code on your own computer so hey everyone my name is Nico i work

on the AI SDK at Vercel I'm really excited about this session today because we're going to be one building something cool but two we're going to be using two new products that were announced today as well as the latest version of the SDK that we just shipped yesterday so a lot of bleeding edge stuff that also means that it's very possible that we'll run into some issues I've

tested it a lot so we should be good to go but you guys are very much bleeding edge today so what we're going to be doing today is we are going to the talk was intentionally broad because we hadn't released a lot of the products that we're going to be using today but the inspiration for this talk if you haven't come across it before is this awesome article from Thorsten Ball where he walked through kind of demystifying how you can build a coding agent and how simple it can really be in this case

the big takeaway here was that it was less than 400 lines of code difference here is this was written in Go and using just Anthropic so we're going to be building something exactly like this a coding agent like a cloud code or a codex CLI we're going to start with it locally just on our machine then we're going to bring in Vercel Sandbox so that our agent is going to be operating in a sandbox environment and then we are going to be

deploying it to a Vercel Function so that you can call it from anywhere the last thing to mention that we're going to be using is we're going to be using the Vercel AI gateway as our LLM provider here so yeah I'm really excited about this it's also really cool because it's the first workshop I'm doing where we're using only Vercel stuff usually we have to set up we have all these prereqs of going to your LLM provider and getting an API key and all this other kind of stuff so the setup should be really seamless today

so where do we want to start i usually do slides so this is kind of new for me no slides today i hope everyone is okay with that we're just going to be getting right into building I also wanted to do a quick check beforehand how many people are familiar with the AI SDK okay very good how many people have shipped something with the AI SDK still pretty good okay cool so today this is going to be a bit more of an advanced session in the sense that we are going to be building something that we're going to be deploying as well if you're stuck on anything I'd suggest

just keep following along and you can use this companion site later to go through it on your own time and yeah last thing if you have questions I would say we'll try and hold them to the very end because we have a lot to do but if like you're blocked npm isn't working whatever it might be Hugo's over here i think Andrew is somewhere as well and you can flag them down and try

and get help from there sound good cool so the the companion site is at https://ship-25-agents-workshop.vercel.app/ i shouldn't forget that everyone got that i mean let me try and blow it up yeah I'll get it how can I make it bigger