by The AI SDK is one of the most popular open-source AI projects in the world. It serves over 20 million npm downloads a week and the repo has over 26,000 stars. Maintaining the codebase means tracking four moving targets at once:
- Model providers: new providers, new capabilities, and new bugs
- UI frameworks: bindings for React, Next.js, Svelte, Vue, and others
- Sandboxes: the execution environments agents run code in
- Harnesses: adapters for Codex, Claude Code, Pi, and others
fter multiple years of growth, the repo was getting 100+ new issues every month, and when Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 model was released, PRs hit an inflection point. By late June, that compounding had accumulated over 1,000 open issues and almost 800 pull requests.
That backlog is not a discipline problem. No maintainer, however good, can close that gap by working harder, and because generating code is cheap, it will only grow.
Instead of trying to scale ourselves, we built a software factory. Four weeks in, it authors between 25 and 35% of PRs we merge and closes 70-80% of issues.
