AI Engineering Stack
Streaming & Vercel AI SDK
Building responsive, real-time AI user interfaces using streaming APIs.
Interview: High - Streaming is mandatory for production AI product UX.
Why Streaming Matters
Streaming Architecture
LLM generation is slow. Waiting 10 seconds for a full paragraph to generate before displaying it results in a poor user experience. Streaming allows tokens to be rendered on the UI the moment they are generated by the model.
The Vercel AI SDK
The Vercel AI SDK has become the industry standard for building AI interfaces in TypeScript/React. It abstracts away the complexity of handling HTTP Server-Sent Events (SSE) and managing UI state.
Core Modules
ai/core: Unified API (generateText,streamText) that works across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.ai/react: React hooks (useChat,useCompletion) for managing streaming state.ai/rsc: React Server Components integration for streaming UI components directly from the server.
Use Cases
Chat interfaces (like ChatGPT)
Real-time text autocompletion in text editors
Streaming raw JSON data to populate a dashboard progressively
Common Mistakes
Buffering the stream on the backend before sending to the client
Not handling network interruptions or stream disconnects properly
Updating React state too aggressively (e.g. per token) instead of using optimized hooks