Building durable Agents with Workflow DevKit & AI SDK - Peter Wielander, Vercel

Thank you all for coming. Hello. Hello. >> Got you. Uh, I don't know about you, but um, my

ride agents, I like focusing on the capabilities and the features, and I like not thinking about um, all of the extra effort that goes into getting something that works locally into production. And something that's very useful for that is uh, a workflow pattern. And that's why we developed the workflow def kit which is what we're talking about today. Presumably if you're here you've had similar issues. Um and today uh we are going to um turn

a agent uh coding agent um into a workflow supported coding agent throughout this session. So this slide. So we um have a open- source example um ready to go. Uh this is on the versel/examples repository. Uh so you can clone that and check out the VIP coding platform app insight. Uh we're going to be using this

app um for today's demo. Um and after we're done we get first class observability built in and also durability reliability. uh we get a lot of extra features like resumability um and draft kit makes it very easy to add human in loop workflows and similar uh things. So if you think about our uh general agent loop um that we've all seen

before, we mostly have calls back and forth from another LAM um to our to calls and our backend uh code, right? Which would include MCP servers, human approval, any kind of async tasks. And uh the usual way to go about this is to uh wire up some cues um and a database especially if you are doing longunning agents right that might run for hours um and you want to scale and

you're running on serverless for example uh you want something some kind of reliability layout in between which usually is filled by cues um and then you'll also need to add a lot of error and retry code you'll need to store all the messages that people are sending and also between states and you probably also need to add some kind of observability layer in between. All of those things we are going to do today uh using only a single library which is the workflow development kit. Um it's open

source um and it runs with any of your TypeScript um front ends or backends and can also run on any cloud. Uh we're going to be deploying to Brazil today, but this could just as easily run or any of your cloud stacks um orbase or any of your custom stacks. Um all right, so who here has heard of

the workflow pattern or has used a workflow library before? Show of hands. All right, that's less than half. Um I'm going to quickly explain what a workflow pattern is um to uh make it clear what we're doing and then in about 2 minutes we're going to go into the code. So um a workflow pattern is essentially a sort of orchestration layer um that separates your code into steps that can run in isolation and can be retrieded um and have their uh data persisted and a