← All speakers

Bio, Work & Ideas

Peter Wielander

Conference affiliation: Vercel · 2025

Peter Wielander is a software engineer at Vercel and a founding contributor to the open-source Workflow SDK, which gives TypeScript applications and AI agents persistent execution, automatic recovery, and operational visibility. He focuses on making agents dependable when their work outlasts individual requests, deployments, or serverless instances.

Before Vercel, Wielander was a staff software engineer and technical lead for emerging products at Minerva Project, developing technology for active learning in higher education. He also created RealPhabet, a tool for practicing unfamiliar writing systems.

His AI Engineer Code workshop converted a coding agent built with AI SDK, Next.js, and Vercel Sandbox into a recoverable workflow. His approach turns ordinary TypeScript functions into deterministic orchestration and individually persisted execution steps, making model requests and tool calls observable, retryable, and resumable.

  • Durable execution without bespoke infrastructure: Workflow SDK provides persisted state, retries, and inspection without requiring each application team to assemble separate queues, databases, and recovery mechanisms.
  • Resumable streams and human approval: Clients can reconnect to interrupted agent output, while webhook-based approvals and scheduled tasks suspend workflows without continuously consuming compute.
  • Safe retries and explicit system boundaries: Side effects belong in execution steps; developers remain responsible for idempotency and permissions. Workflow durability does not preserve an external sandbox’s state or provide security isolation.
  • Deployment isolation and workflow versioning: Wielander’s workflow-versioning proposal keeps existing runs pinned to their originating deployment and treats upgrades as deliberate compatibility decisions.
  • Framework-portable developer tooling: He coauthored Workflow SDK support for TanStack Start, expanding durable execution across the TypeScript ecosystem.

As AI-generated code becomes cheaper, Wielander argues that durable, observable production infrastructure becomes more important: generating an application is easier than ensuring its agents remain understandable and reliable.

Read the topics behind these talks

1 conference talk

Key ideas

Scroll to read ↓

Turn a request-bound coding agent into a workflow with persistent streams, durable waits and human approval, then examine the boundaries of retries, permissions and deployment versioning.

  • An agent that works locally still needs a production runtime
    0:28 ↗
  • Keep the existing application boundaries visible
    5:10 ↗
  • Extract and compile the orchestration function
    9:17 ↗
  • Mark the tools and inspect the run
    15:38 ↗
  • Restore the tool progress packets
    18:42 ↗
  • Reconnect without starting another agent
    23:42 ↗
  • Wait without keeping an execution instance alive
    27:47 ↗
  • Expose sleep as an agent tool
    31:58 ↗
  • Pause for approval before building a Pokédex
    37:20 ↗
  • Durability stops at the boundaries you expose
    43:18 ↗
  • Separate run lifetime from step limits and deployment changes
    46:44 ↗
  • Compose backends, schedules and communication
    52:17 ↗
  • Design side effects for retries
    58:03 ↗
  • Pin versions by default, migrate deliberately
    1:01:46 ↗
  • Inspect execution without exposing secrets
    1:07:16 ↗

References