AI SDK: A Deep Dive with Nico Albanese

I have a legendary show today with a member of Vercel. And we're going to talk about the AI SDK and how this can actually unlock really amazing and exceptional user experiences for your AI apps. So today I have with me, Nico. Hey, Nico, how's it going? Welcome to the show. Hey, man, it's going very well. I think a little bit colder here in London that it is for you in Hawaii. But I'll be just fine. Yes. No, I'm so delighted to have you.

We're literally covering so many time zones here. You know, I have to wake up super early. It's about 7 a.m. And I'm just really happy to have you here because one of the things that really kind of blew me away while I was at the Nextjs conference was the fact that you did this really great presentation about the AI SDK. And it's open source. And it's a way to actually make your AI apps responsive in these different ways. and part of my background is having work

with UI and UX experiences on mobile. It's I'm learning more about web frameworks. And what you were showing was a level of detail that I haven't really seen in other frameworks. And this is just getting started and is continuing to mature. And some of those things included some structured execution or structured extraction, some generative UI stuff and some Zod schemas and validations. And so if this sounds French or if this sounds French, or if this sounds another language to you, don't be put off by this because we're

going to try to approach this a little bit from a, , sort of beginner or whatever. I am still early and still learning NextJS as a programming language, but I come from the client-side world. And so what I want to do is try to maybe help you as a user explain some of these processes. And I'm actually kind of coming in from the top down. And when I say that, I'm coming in more from the, I pretend to be a user, how would I use these devices and what are those types of things? and experiences that I can kind of tighten up to make my apps just that much

better. And the way that we can do that, you know, is by looking through the documentation. But really, who has time to look through all this documentation? It's too much, right? So we can speed that up by having Nico here. So, yeah, now I'm really excited that we're going to be able to kind of cover some of these topics here about, you know, how do you talk to a language model? How do you get that information from a language model? And then once you have that, then how do you combine that into? with some type of UI experience. And so we're going to walk through a series of code and some slides.

And this can be really highly interactive. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them into the actual comments and reactions. So that way, I'll slide you right in, just Pulp ML here. And also Hertzfeld Labs, you know, that's awesome. Thank you, Hertzfeld as well. So, yeah, without further ado, thanks, Nico. Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for having me here. This feels really fun as well. It was really fun to finally meet because I think we've known each other for almost a year now on the internet.

That's right. And so it was really cool to finally meet you and meet Mickey and Ravia and all the other guys at NextConf. But yeah, thank you for having me. What we want to do today is go through a bit of an introduction to the AI SDK. I don't have a strict agenda for this, but we were going to take, as you, had said a bit of my session, my workshop that I had given at NextConf, which was

talking through how to build an AI app. And so we're going to go through and hopefully learn a bit of this through actually coding and building some cool stuff. And with that in mind, I have about four or five small little projects that are split across a few different areas that we'll we'll use, we'll start by building a few terminal programs just to understand how to call the model programmatically or call models programmatically. Then we'll look at