AI SDK v6: The Practical Guide to Shipping AI Features Without Vendor Lock-In (2026)

I spent most of last year bolting AI features onto products the wrong way. Direct provider SDK. Hardcoded model string. A streaming response handler I copy pasted from a blog post. It worked. It also meant that every time a new model came out, switching took half a day of untangling types and rewriting stream parsers that I did not remember writing in the first place. The AI SDK v6 is the fix I wish I had a year ago.