---
type: entity
subtype: tool
title: "Vercel AI SDK"
description: "The front-end AI library whose llms.txt documentation Cole crawls as the demo knowledge base and uses to build a Claude 4 chat UI."
resource: "https://sdk.vercel.ai"
tags: [agent-framework, frontend, typescript]
videos: [all-the-best-rag-strategies-in-one-mcp-for-ai-coding-assistants, i-forked-boltnew-and-made-it-way-better, the-only-ai-developer-roadmap-you-need-in-2024]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# Vercel AI SDK

The Vercel AI SDK is a TypeScript library for building the user-facing layer of AI applications: chat interfaces, streaming responses, and provider-agnostic model calls. Cole frames it plainly at [0:02:34]: "I'm going to be using the documentation for the Vercel AI SDK. This is a front-end library helping you create front-end applications around your AI agents." It is not an orchestration framework so much as the connective tissue between a front end and whatever model or agent sits behind it.

Cole uses the SDK in two distinct ways across his videos. First, it is a running favorite in his tooling recommendations. In the developer roadmap he calls it out directly at [0:13:04]: "the Vercel AI SDK is actually my favorite I'm going to be making videos on this in the future it is such a great piece of technology." Second, its documentation doubles as a convenient real-world corpus. When demoing RAG strategies he crawls the SDK's `llms.txt` docs to stand up a knowledge base, then feeds that knowledge back into a build: at [0:06:14] he notes "I took one of the templates from the Vercel AI SDK and I used my new knowledge base to make some improvements." The SDK is therefore both the subject of retrieval and the surface being improved.

The SDK's core value is provider independence at the call site. When forking Bolt.new, Cole points at how the SDK abstracts model access at [0:17:35]: "each of these functions is going to work with a specific provider to get any model ... this is all from the Vercel AI SDK." That same abstraction has friction, though. Customizing the SDK's chat primitives is not always trivial. Working with its React hook he observes at [0:14:13] that "it is using the used chat Hook from the AI SDK from Vercel and it's not super easy to customize that to add a new parameter." The takeaway across the catalog: the SDK gets you a working, multi-provider chat UI fast, but deep customization means fighting its opinionated hooks.

## Realizes

- [Provider Independence](../../concepts/provider-independence.md) - Architecting agents so the underlying model, framework, or client can be swapped without a rewrite, avoiding lock-in through low-level abstractions.
- [Model Selection](../../concepts/model-selection.md) - Choosing the right LLM per task by trading off quality, speed, and cost, often routing easy requests to cheap models and hard ones to expensive models.

## Works with

- [Bolt.new](./bolt-new.md) - StackBlitz's commercial AI coding platform that generates entire full-stack applications; the stable product bolt.DIY forks from.
- [MCP](./mcp.md) - The protocol used to connect Claude Code to external tools and servers.
- [Eve (Vercel)](./eve.md) - Vercel's open-source 'file-system first' agent framework where an entire agent is a single folder of markdown/TypeScript, compiled and deployed to production with durable sessions, sandboxing, human-in-the-loop, and evals.

## Related

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)](../../concepts/rag.md) - Grounding an LLM's answers by retrieving relevant documents from an external knowledge base and injecting them into the prompt at query time.
- [Vector Embeddings](../../concepts/vector-embeddings.md) - Numeric representations of text that enable semantic similarity search, stored and managed in a vector database for retrieval.
- [Learn by Building](../../concepts/learn-by-building.md) - Learning AI engineering by building real projects, forking open source, and rebuilding from docs rather than passive study.
- [Local AI](../../concepts/local-ai.md) - Running open-weight models on your own hardware or cloud for privacy, cost control, and independence from API providers.

## Sources

- [All the BEST RAG Strategies in ONE MCP for AI Coding Assistants](../../sources/all-the-best-rag-strategies-in-one-mcp-for-ai-coding-assistants.md) - "[0:02:34] I'm going to be using the documentation for the Vercel AI SDK. This is a front-end library helping you create front-end applications around your AI agents."
- [I Forked Bolt.new and Made it WAY Better](../../sources/i-forked-boltnew-and-made-it-way-better.md) - "[0:17:35] each of these functions is going to work with a specific provider to get any model ... this is all from the Vercel AI SDK"
- [The ONLY AI Developer Roadmap You Need in 2024](../../sources/the-only-ai-developer-roadmap-you-need-in-2024.md) - "[0:13:04] the Vercel AI SDK is actually my favorite I'm going to be making videos on this in the future it is such a great piece of technology"
