What's your solution to UI for Tanstack AI?

[winstonpurnomo]

With Vercel ai SDK, they have the AI Elements to add shadcn-style components for UI to make it easy. But the types are different than Tanstack AI. For those who use tanstack AI, do you use AI Elements and just change the types etc? Or a different solution?

[barry166]

I would treat TanStack AI as the headless/state layer and keep the UI components app-owned. The messages array already gives you stable known part.type values like text and tool calls, so the clean path is to write your own MessageList, ToolCall, composer, etc. around those parts.

You can adapt AI Elements if you like the look, but I would do that through a thin mapping layer instead of trying to make its Vercel AI SDK types the source of truth. In practice: TanStack AI owns transport/state/tools, your UI owns rendering, and any shadcn/AI Elements components are just presentational components fed by mapped TanStack message parts.