Build a Production AI Research Agent in 30 Minutes (Complete Tutorial)

Most AI agent tutorials show you a demo. This one shows you a production system. By the end of this post you will have a working Research Assistant agent that takes a question, searches the web, reads relevant pages, synthesizes findings, and saves a structured report. It will have memory, error handling, structured output, streaming responses, and a deployment path. The kind of system you could charge money for. We are using the Vercel AI SDK v6, TypeScript, Claude Opus 4.6, and Next.js. What We're Building The Research Assistant: Takes a research question as input Searches the web for relevant sources using Brave Search Reads the content of promising pages using Jina Reader Synthesizes findings into a structured report Saves the completed report to a database Returns a streaming response so the user sees progress in real time Here is the project structure: research-agent/ app/ api/ research/ route.ts <- streaming API endpoint lib/ agent/ tools.ts <- tool definitions agent.ts <- agent