Anyone can build agents, but it takes a platform to run them
By Steven Van ·
Vercel details how its internal data agent d0 runs on Sandboxes, Fluid compute, AI Gateway and Workflows, built by one person in a few weeks.
Vercel published a post arguing that the hard part of agents isn't building them, since AI can already scaffold a working prototype, but operating them reliably at scale. As its example, the company described how d0, its internal text-to-SQL data agent, runs on Vercel's agent orchestration platform: a Slack question triggers a workflow that checks the user's data permissions, explores a YAML-based semantic layer, and returns an answer with a chart or Google Sheet link, all built by one person in a few weeks using about 20% of their time.
Vercel credits that to platform primitives that handle the operational work agents create:
- Sandboxes: isolated Linux VMs that contain untested or AI-generated code and limit the damage from prompt injection.
- Fluid compute: scales automatically for the unpredictable, sometimes data-heavy workloads agents produce, billing only for compute time used.
- AI Gateway: routes requests across hundreds of models, sending simple queries to fast models and complex analysis to models like Claude Opus, with budget control and automatic failover if a provider goes down.
- Workflows: durably orchestrates multi-step agent tasks, retrying failed steps such as a Snowflake timeout or model error without manual intervention.
- Observability: shows what an agent is actually doing, for debugging unexpected behaviour.
Vercel says it runs several other internal agents on the same stack, including a lead qualification agent (template available), a customer support agent it says handles 87% of initial questions, an abuse detection agent, and a content agent that turns Slack threads into draft blog posts. Its products v0 and Vercel Agent, which reviews pull requests and analyses incidents, run on the same primitives. The post also cites OpenAI's internal data agent and a customer-facing financial impact calculator Stripe built, according to Vercel, on a flight.
