Mastra is a TypeScript framework that wraps the Vercel AI SDK with typed tools, a model router, and a built-in Studio playground for chatting with your agents and inspecting traces.

This recipe is a four-tool browser agent: open-session, navigate, snapshot, extract. Each tool drives a Steel cloud session over Playwright. The agent runs against github.com/trending/python and returns a Zod-validated FinalReport.

const researchAgent = new Agent({
  id: "research-agent",
  name: "Steel Research",
  instructions: "You operate a Steel cloud browser via tools. ...",
  model: "anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5",
  tools: { openSession, navigate, snapshot, extract },
});

export const mastra = new Mastra({ agents: { researchAgent } });

const result = await researchAgent.generate(prompt, {
  structuredOutput: {
    schema: FinalReport,
    model: "anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5",
  },
  maxSteps: 15,
  onStepFinish: async (step) => { ... },
});

console.log(result.object); // typed as z.infer<typeof FinalReport>

Run it

cd examples/mastra
cp .env.example .env          # set STEEL_API_KEY and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
npm install
npx playwright install chromium
npm start

Get keys at app.steel.dev/settings/api-keys and console.anthropic.com. The open-session tool prints a Live View URL; open it in another tab to watch the browser as the agent works.

Mastra requires Node 22.13+. If npm install complains about engines, nvm use 22 (or newer) first.

Your output varies. Structure looks like this:

Steel + Mastra Starter
============================================================
    open-session: 1433ms
  step: openSession | 1549 tokens
    navigate: 708ms
  step: navigate | 1702 tokens
    snapshot: 400ms (2630 chars, 99 links)
  step: snapshot | 1829 tokens
    extract: 120ms (14 rows)
  step: extract | 5595 tokens
  step: (text only) | 6802 tokens

Agent finished.

Structured output:
{
  "summary": "These repositories represent cutting-edge AI and ML...",
  "repos": [
    { "name": "owner/repo", "url": "...", "stars": "1,204", "description": "..." },
    ...
  ]
}

Releasing Steel session...
Session released. Replay: https://app.steel.dev/sessions/ab12cd34...

A full run takes ~20-40 seconds and a few cents of Steel session time plus Anthropic tokens. The finally block calls steel.sessions.release(); skip it and the session keeps billing until the default 5-minute timeout.

Open the Studio

Mastra ships a local playground for chatting with agents, watching tool calls, and replaying traces. Run alongside the script:

npx mastra dev

It serves at http://localhost:4111 and reads the mastra registry exported from index.ts. Pick research-agent in the sidebar, drop in a prompt, and watch each tool call as the agent works.

Make it yours

• Swap the model. Change the model string. "openai/gpt-5-mini", "google/gemini-2.5-flash", "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6" all work; set the matching API key in .env.
• Swap the task. Change the prompt and the FinalReport schema. The four tools are task-agnostic.
• Add a tool. A click tool wrapping page.click, a screenshot tool returning a base64 PNG. Add to the tools record.
• Add memory. Install @mastra/memory plus a storage adapter (@mastra/libsql), pass memory on the Agent, then call generate(prompt, { memory: { resource, thread } }) to persist conversation across runs. See Mastra memory docs.
• Wrap it in a workflow. For multi-step pipelines (login → scrape → summarize) where each step needs to be retryable or human-resumable, port the tool calls into createStep blocks under a createWorkflow. See Mastra workflows.
• Turn on stealth. Pass useProxy, solveCaptcha, or sessionTimeout to steel.sessions.create({...}) for sites with anti-bot.

Related

Vercel AI SDK version · OpenAI Agents SDK version · Mastra docs · Mastra Studio

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