AI SDK (Vercel)
The AI SDK is a provider-agnostic TypeScript toolkit maintained by Vercel and contributors, designed to simplify building AI-powered applications and agents. It exposes a unified API surface that lets developers call different model providers (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Generative AI) through the same interfaces. This reduces integration friction when switching providers or supporting multiple providers simultaneously.
Key capabilities include:
- Unified provider & model architecture: a single API to configure and call different model providers and models, with provider-specific adapters available as companion packages.
- Text generation and structured outputs: helpers for plain text generation and structured outputs (schemas) so models can return validated structured data.
- Agent framework: built-in agent classes (e.g., ToolLoopAgent) and tool integrations to create agents that interact with external tools, run commands in sandboxes, or call other APIs.
- UI integration: framework-agnostic UI hooks and components for creating chat interfaces and generative UX. Official UI packages exist for React and other frameworks to speed up building chat and tool-based interfaces.
- Image generation & tool invocations: example agents and tool integrations for image generation and other model-backed tasks, with support for partial images and streaming where supported by providers.
- Templates & docs: ready-made templates and extensive documentation (api reference, provider guides) for quick project bootstrapping and real-world examples.
The SDK targets modern web and server runtimes (Node.js 18+), and is designed to be extensible: developers can add new provider adapters, custom tools, and integrate it into Next.js App Router routes, edge functions, or serverless handlers. The project includes example code for integrating agents, streaming agent UI responses, and wiring tool outputs into components.
Because it is provider-agnostic and open-source, the AI SDK is particularly useful for teams who want a consistent developer experience across providers, need agent tooling out of the box, or want to ship production-ready AI features with minimal provider-lockin. Documentation and API references are available at the official site.
