Show HN: Mastra 1.0, open-source JavaScript agent framework from the Gatsby devs

LOL thanks swyx. Yeah we realized although we _could_ fight that war again...it would be better for everyone if we didn't...

And I actually hadn't seen that Brex piece so thanks for sharing!!

I learned that every step that can be solved reasonably without an LLM, should be solved without an LLM. Reliability, cost, performance, etc.

I try to transfer as much work as I can out of LLMs and into deterministic steps. This includes most of the “orchestration” layer which is usually deterministic by nature.

Sprinkle a little bit of AI in the right places and you’ll get something that appears genuinely intelligent. Rely too much on AI and it’s dumb as fuck.

Make their tasks very small and simple (ideally, one step), give them only the context and tools that they need and nothing else, and provide them with feedback when they inevitably mess up (ideally, deterministically), and hope for the best.

Thank you for using us, and for the feedback!

Do you have code snippets you can share about how you wanted to write the rules? Want to understand desired grammar / syntax better.

Yes a book is exactly what makes sense in this very immature and fast changing space.

It's especially effective when you litter it around ai company offices in SF

You found the Easter egg!

Re: lessons from coding agents, we're building some of the key abstractions like sandboxes, filesystem, skills/knowledge as Mastra primitives in over the next month.

For any agent you're shipped to production though you probably want a harness that's open-source so you more fully control / can customize the experience.

If I had some heartfelt advice for the Mastra devrel team it would be to shut up about about Gatsby.

I'm a happy Mastra user and I'm biased to their success. But I think linking it to an unrelated project is only going to matter to non-technical CXOs who choose technology based on names not merits. And that's not the audience Mastra needs to appeal to to be successful. Good dev tools and techs trickle from the bottom up in engineering organizations.

Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, and an agent framework developer his long term plans

Have a ton of respect for the AI SDK team. Initially we only used AI SDK model routing, but now we also have our own built-in model routing as well.

I see each of us having different architectures. AI SDK is more low-level, and Mastra is more integrated with storage powering our studio, evals, memory, workflow suspend/resume etc.

Thanks for the feedback! Our mission with Mastra is to make sure users can get further faster with the standard primitives of AI engineering! We learned over the last year that while we want to be opinionated, users need to be able to eject and adapt Mastra however they want! We added server adapters so users didn’t have to deal with our opinions on esbuild, we made storage more configurable and extendable, and invested more into our workflows engine which will be the foundation for distributed execution in the future! We are always willing to hear feedback and welcome changes! Would love to know what you learn from the langchain comparison and happy to improve Mastra from it! Thanks!

There's the normal stuff you'd expect -- we're all Opus-pilled, use Claude Code, a PR review bot etc. But it's been especially helpful with highly templatized code like our storage adapters, we already have 10-15 working examples which makes the n+1st adapter almost trivial to write.

Hi. I'm on the Mastra team, and I've built out the observability stack. We support outputting traces to numerous 3rd party tools, and also our own system.

More info can be found here: https://mastra.ai/docs/observability/tracing/overview#export...

In the coming months we will add improvements to logging, overall metric collection, experimentation tracing, and numerous additional observability features.

Thanks for your interest.

When Langchain was the only option rolling your own made a lot of sense!

These days we see things going the other way, where teams that started rolling their own shift over to Mastra so they can focus on the agent vs having to maintain an internal framework.

The Latent Space article swyx linked earlier includes a quote from the Brex CTO talking about how they did that.

Thanks! That's a lot of why we built Mastra. We wanted something that felt like it was made for us.

Thanks! And of course hope you try Mastra out when you do.

You should use whatever framework you feel like has the best DX / fits your stack best!

We're TypeScript-first, TypeScript-only so a lot of the teams who use us are full-stack TypeScript devs and want an agent framework that feels TS-native, easy to use, and feature-complete.

Spring AI is fantastic for Java shops. I am assuming Typescript devs will enjoy Mastra just as much .

Strands documentation seems very underwhelming compared to Mastra

seems non of these are typescript-based? Strand appears to have a typescript sdk available but not natively ts.

Thanks, great to hear!

Re: Tanstack AI, really depends on adoption. We've known Tanner since his react-static days and if it takes off we'll def work together.

Re: Mastra cloud -- this is basically hosted services, eg observability, hosted studio, hosted serverless deployments, as distinct from the framework.

With server adapters you can now deploy your studio in your infra. We're going to pull multi-project / multi-user Mastra cloud features into a Mastra admin feature so you can run these locally or deploy them on your infra as well (with EE licensing for stuff like RBAC). Stay tuned here.

Less frequently sites and more frequently a SaaS app, for example Sanity released a content agent in their CMS, Factorial released an agent inside their HR/payroll product.

But tons of other use cases too, eg dev teams at Workday and PayPal have built an agentic SRE to triage their alerts, etc etc

We've always supported letting folks specify their agent hierarchy, eg agent supervisor, workflow orchestrator, mix and match, etc.

But people kept asking us for a multi-agent primitive out of the box so we shipped `agent.network()`, which is basically dynamic hierarchy decided at runtime, pass in an array of workflows and agents to the routing agent and let it decide what to do, how long to execute for, etc!

https://mastra.ai/docs/agents/networks

I mean we're framework guys so I would agree!

Our cloud platform is in beta so it's free right now!

Those are both good options. You should try us all out and see which one you like best!

thanks!

Thank you! We have an incredible designer and we love obsessing about this stuff.

Cloud-hosted observability + studio features (and self-hosted with EE bits).

You can take a look at the cloud platform at cloud.mastra.ai, it's in beta currently

It's the same play we did at Gatsby to get to several million in ARR in a couple of years

It's crazy that my comment was up voted then flagged.