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Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

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Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#111

Post by incanspyder »

_pdp_ wrote: post #85

I don't want to be that person but there are hundreds of other similar frameworks doing more or less the same thing. Do you know why? Because writing a framework that orchestrates a number of tools with a model is the easy part. In fact, most of the time you don't even need a framework. All of these framework focus on the trivial and you can tell that simply by browsing the examples section. This is like 5% of the wo…

Couldn't agree more. This also looks mostly like a Typescript "port" of Langgraph, and I say "port" because Langgraph has a TS framework already.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#112

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

delduca wrote: post #100
jcheng wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? I’ve never used it but have heard good things from colleagues who have.

Lock in.

What lock in?

I use their AI SDK, but never touch vercel servers. It's just a unified interface.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#113

Post by MattDaEskimo »

mikehostetler wrote: post #109
cpursley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and it feels like JS is just the wrong runtime for agents. Really languages that can model state in sane ways and have a good concurrency story like Elixir make much more sense. And here’s a fun exercise: ask Claude via Cursor or Perplexity with R1 to create a basic agentic framework for you in your language of choice on top of Instructor.

> good concurrency story like Elixir make much more sense Agree, that's why I've been building this: https://github.com/agentjido/jido

Call me an elixir virgin until 5 minutes ago. This language from a quick glance seems perfect for agent orchestration.

Project looks great, will follow & learn.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#114

Post by jerrygoyal »

fsndz wrote: post #93
_pdp_ wrote: post #85

I don't want to be that person but there are hundreds of other similar frameworks doing more or less the same thing. Do you know why? Because writing a framework that orchestrates a number of tools with a model is the easy part. In fact, most of the time you don't even need a framework. All of these framework focus on the trivial and you can tell that simply by browsing the examples section. This is like 5% of the wo…

True. That's the reason I see a lot of people dropping similar frameworks like LangChain recently: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/drop-langcha...

i was using vercel ai sdk for my production app and it was such a bad experience that I eventually went with native implementation and tbh it was not much of work thanks to cursor. problems i faced: too many bugs (just browse their github repo to get an idea), the UI side also had suboptimal performance based on how they implemented hooks.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#115

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #114
fsndz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. That's the reason I see a lot of people dropping similar frameworks like LangChain recently: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/drop-langcha...

i was using vercel ai sdk for my production app and it was such a bad experience that I eventually went with native implementation and tbh it was not much of work thanks to cursor. problems i faced: too many bugs (just browse their github repo to get an idea), the UI side also had suboptimal performance based on how they implemented hooks.

vercel's whole shtick is to make money off of dumb js devs who do not know better. i think they pay far too much attention on how things look compared to how things work. but hey, they made millions, possibly billions off of those js devs so who is to blame them.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#117

Post by ToJans »

brap wrote: post #39

I don’t really understand agents. I just don’t get why we need to pretend we have multiple personalities, especially when they’re all using the same model. Can anyone please give me a usecase, that couldn’t be solved with a single API call to a modern LLM (capable of multi-step planning/reasoning) and a proper prompt? Or is this really just about building the prompt, and giving the LLM closer guidance by splitting in…

AI seems to forget more things as the context window grows. Agents keep scope local and focused, so you can get better/faster results, or use models trained on specific tasks.

Just like in real life, there's generalists and experts. Depending on your task you might prefer an expert over a generalist, think f.e. brain surgery versus "summarize this text".

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#118

Post by cjonas »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #108
dartos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, NodeJS doesn’t have concurrency. It’s a single threaded event loop.

It has concurrency with Promise; it doesn't have parallelism.

And these agents are all network I/O bound by the model services so a lot of use cases don't need threading.

I would argue that python is the overrated language when it comes to building agents. Just because it's the language of choice for training models doesn't mean it should be for building apps against them.

The dx typescript brings to these types of applications is nice.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#119

Post by Palmik »

The example from the landing page does not exactly spark joy:

    testWorkflow
     .step(llm)
       .then(decider)
       .then(agentOne)
       .then(workflow)
     .after(decider)
       .then(agentTwo)
       .then(workflow)
      .commit();
On a first glance, this looks like a very awkward way to represent the graph from the picture. And this is just a simple "workflow" (the structure of the graph does not depend on the results of the execution), not an agent.

Re: Show HN: Mastra – Open-source JS agent framework, by the developers of Gatsby

#120

Post by holoduke »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #108
dartos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, NodeJS doesn’t have concurrency. It’s a single threaded event loop.

It has concurrency with Promise; it doesn't have parallelism.

No real concurrency. No scheduling. If you are not working with a lot of IO then js would be a poor choice. But in this case we talk about network calls, so definitely IO. The settimout, promise, request methods will do their job.
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