March 2024 Summaries

The web development landscape is rapidly evolving, particularly when it comes to building GenAI applications. With Vercel’s recent release of AI SDK 3, they have introduced “Generative UI” technology, enabling the integration of customized interactive user interfaces with AI. The Vercel AI SDK takes care of the intricate task of bridging your application code with a large language model (LLM). In this guide, we'll be building an example application — a vacation house rental platform — to showcase how simple it is to create a fast, type-safe, and maintainable application using Vercel's exceptional SDK, EdgeDB, and Next.js. The goal is to provide users with an interactive experience that allows them to effortlessly browse, book, and add houses to their wishlists. By the end of this guide, you will learn how to set up a Next.js project integrated with Vercel AI SDK and EdgeDB, design a database schema for an example application using EdgeDB, implement generative UI functionality, enabling users to ask questions and interact with the application using natural language. The tech stack includes Vercel AI SDK, EdgeDB, and Next.js. The guide focuses on building the core of an AI-powered application with EdgeDB, skipping details like styling and the UI implementation. It uses OpenAI's GPT-4 model for generating responses to user inputs. The guide covers setting up a project, designing a database schema using EdgeDB, implementing generative UI functionality, tracking house selection, adding booking functionality, and exploring future improvements such as incorporating more sophisticated AI capabilities and extending the EdgeDB schema. Vercel's AI SDK expands the possibility space for LLMs by allowing them to call custom code and fetch data, rendering that with custom UI components. The guide demonstrates how to use the confirmBooking function in a component to initiate the booking process. By adding EdgeDB to the stack, you'll have a performant data store designed to allow you to iterate on your newly capable AI app with greater speed and efficiency.

The blog post explores the development of AI-powered web applications using Vercel's AI SDK 3, which introduces "Generative UI" technology to integrate interactive user interfaces with AI. The guide walks through building a vacation house rental platform using Vercel AI SDK, EdgeDB, and Next.js, showcasing how to create a fast, type-safe, and maintainable application. The platform allows users to browse, book, and add houses to wishlists, leveraging a modern tech stack that includes Vercel's AI-driven tools for dynamic UI rendering and EdgeDB for efficient data handling. The post details setting up a Next.js project, designing a database schema with EdgeDB, and implementing generative UI functionalities to enable natural language interactions. It also covers the integration of OpenAI's language models, managing AI and UI states, and implementing booking functionalities, highlighting the potential for LLMs to perform actions beyond text generation. Future enhancements could include more sophisticated AI capabilities, richer schema extensions, and conversation history persistence to enhance user experience and data analysis.