Building a Software Factory for the AI SDK

AI SDK is an open-source project with over 20 million npm downloads per week and more than 26,000 GitHub stars. Maintenance complexity has increased as it simultaneously supports model providers, UI frameworks such as React, Next.js, Svelte, and Vue, sandboxes for agents, and harnesses for Codex, Claude Code, and Pi.

Over 100 new issues were registered each month, and PRs surged following the release of Anthropic's Opus 4.6. By the end of June, unresolved issues exceeded 1,000 and pull requests reached approximately 800, but it was difficult to resolve this simply through the efforts of more agents or maintainers.

Vercel determined that a structure relying on a single person's review for all changes was a bottleneck, and built a software factory with reviewer efficiency as a core principle. Within four weeks of its construction, the factory was authoring 25–35% of merged PRs and closing 70–80% of issues.

The factory aims to allocate automation levels and human review effort according to project risk. To this end, it also provides the AI SDK Factory UI, allowing reviewers to view the entire work pipeline at a glance.