Installation and setup

The AI SDK comes from npm as a core package plus one package per model provider. Groq and Google each have a provider package and a free key.

ai, zod, @ai-sdk/openai and tsx

This course needs Node.js 20 or later. zod describes schemas for tools and typed output, @ai-sdk/openai is the OpenAI provider, and tsx runs a TypeScript file directly: every lesson is a file run with npx tsx file.ts.

node --version
npm install ai zod @ai-sdk/openai
npm install --save-dev tsx

A provider package for a free modelOptional

The course uses a stand-in model from lesson 4, so no key is needed to follow along. A real model means installing its provider package and setting the variable it reads; lesson 3 shows the error when that variable is missing.

npm install @ai-sdk/groq

export GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_...

import { generateText } from "ai";
import { groq } from "@ai-sdk/groq";

const { text } = await generateText({
  model: groq("openai/gpt-oss-120b"),
  prompt: "Say hello",
});
console.log(text);

Next.js loads .env.local for you and keeps it out of git; a plain script needs the variable exported first.