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Comment by opwizardx | Hacker News Reader

Is it like a proprietary wrapper for Vercel’s Chat SDK (https://github.com/vercel/chat)?

From quick glance I don’t think so that’s the case. copliotkit promises ag-ui compatiblity., which means it can work with codex cli, mastra, pi, claude agents sdk and other harnesses as well (there are ag ui adapters as well). I’m actually integrating this with claude agent sdk with ag ui adapter., which i don’t think is possible with vercel chat sdk.

I first found out about chat-sdk existence when I was upgrading my nanoclaw (its core feature is that it uses claude agent sdk under the hood as the harness) to v2 and they were migrating to chat-sdk as their base layer for supporting different channels.

It was pretty limited thought in terms of what I needed, so I had to through it away and build my own telegraf sdk based channel implementation for telegram, but that was a while ago, I assume they should have evolved a lot from the time I last touched it about 3 months ago.

Hey, I'm Nathan, DevRel at CopilotKit. That is a really interesting point you are making, and we've heard it a lot. One of the reasons this is so powerful is that it uses AG-UI as the transport, which enables a lot of flexibility depending on your use case. I would love to get your feedback if you decide to give it a spin.

Not proprietary and not a wrapper. Chat SDK served as inspiration, of course, but I think it misses a few hard parts of bringing agents to chat interfaces:

- Generative UI in these surfaces needs to be durable. If your agent composes a Block Kit or Adaptive Cards interface with interactivity, you have to be ready to handle that interactivity weeks later. We handle this with our JSX renderer.

- Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer. The worst thing you can do is have your agent act like a bot: posting all of the time, creating noise, and offering no customization. I think Claude Tag nailed the user experience here, and now we want to empower developers to create agents with a similar UX via open source.

- Truly agent-and-surface agnostic. We're fully powered by AG-UI (ag-ui.com), so you can bring any agent into Slack and then take that same agent to web or mobile all over the same protocol.

Fair on AG-UI, that part is a real difference. But the Chat SDK point is a bit overstated: vercel/chat also has a JSX card system that renders to Block Kit and Adaptive Cards, with button and action handlers and pluggable state backends.

> Chat interfaces are inherently multiplayer.

Both chat and channel sdks support subscribing to threads and can control messages that arrive concurrently. In that regard it feels like this depends more on the logic of the app itself rather than gets defined by the framework/dependency it uses.

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