https://akashpanchal.com Senior AI Software Engineer. Tutorials and notes on building AI agents, voice systems, and scalable platforms. en-us https://akashpanchal.com/articles/voice-agents-hard-problems https://akashpanchal.com/articles/voice-agents-hard-problems The demo is easy — speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech, done. Then a real person talks to it and everything falls apart: the silences are too long, it talks over them, it can't tell when they're done. The hard problems in voice aren't the models. They're latency, barge-in, and turn-taking. Article Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/articles/ai-sdk-v7-features https://akashpanchal.com/articles/ai-sdk-v7-features v7 isn't a coat of paint. It moves the hard parts of agent-building — the multi-step loop, tool approvals, structured output, telemetry — out of your app and into the SDK. Here are the features I reached for the same week they landed, and why. Article Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/articles/agent-runs-code-vercel-sandbox https://akashpanchal.com/articles/agent-runs-code-vercel-sandbox An agent that writes code you can't run is a fancy autocomplete. But running model-generated code on your own box is how you get a crypto miner. I build a mini-app where the agent writes, executes, and self-corrects code inside a Vercel Sandbox microVM — and walk the parts that surprised me. Article Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-evals https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-evals The finale. An agent that ships without evals is a vibe with a deploy button. This part puts numbers on agent quality — deterministic checks, model-graded scorers, pass/fail gates in CI, and live sampling in production — so 'it seems better' becomes 'it scored 0.86, up from 0.71'. Tutorial Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-durable-agents https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-durable-agents Some agent work doesn't fit in one request. It scrapes forty pages, waits on a human, or runs on a schedule. This part covers the machinery for work that outlives the HTTP request: background tasks, durable agents that survive a crash, and heartbeats that run on a cron. Tutorial Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-rag https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-rag A streaming agent that answers from the model's memory is still guessing. In this part I build a retrieval pipeline — chunk, embed, store, query — and wire it under the agent so it answers from your actual documents, with citations. Tutorial Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-streaming https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-streaming A blocking generate() call is fine for a script. An interactive agent needs to stream — tokens, tool calls, and your own custom progress events. I wire agent.stream() into a UI and learn where the interesting data actually lives. Tutorial Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-harness https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-harness Part three of the Mastra series. An agent and some tools aren't an application yet. Mastra's harness — the AgentController runtime — adds the session, modes, subagents, and tool approvals that turn an agent into something users can actually depend on. Tutorial Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-workflows https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-workflows Part two of the Mastra series. Agents are great at deciding; workflows are great at guaranteeing. I build typed, multi-step workflows with sequencing, parallelism, branching, loops, and human-in-the-loop suspend & resume. Tutorial Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-agents https://akashpanchal.com/tutorials/mastra-agents The first part of a hands-on series on Mastra. I start where everything else builds from — defining a typed agent, giving it tools with createTool, and wiring memory so it remembers across turns. Tutorial Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT