Devoured - April 23, 2026
Ship AI-powered Products Faster (Website)

Ship AI-powered Products Faster (Website)

Design aiagentsinfrastructuredevops Read original

21st Agents is a Y Combinator-backed platform that provides production infrastructure for deploying AI agents with built-in sandboxing, authentication, UI components, and observability.

What: A managed infrastructure service that handles the operational complexity of running AI agents in production, including isolated sandboxed runtimes using E2B with gVisor, credential management, drop-in React chat components, and tracing dashboards. Developers define agents in TypeScript with Zod schemas and deploy via CLI.
Why it matters: Building an AI agent prototype is straightforward, but productionizing requires solving infrastructure challenges like secure container sandboxing, secrets injection, token exchange authentication, tenant isolation, and observability that can take months to implement properly.
Takeaway: Developers can start with free pay-as-you-go pricing and explore templates for common use cases like support agents, lead research, or web scraping, with enterprise options for on-premise deployment in your own VPC.
Decoder
  • E2B sandbox: Execution environment that provides isolated runtime containers for running code securely
  • gVisor: Google's application kernel that provides an additional security layer for containerized workloads
  • Zod schemas: TypeScript-first schema validation library used to define data structure and validation rules
  • Token exchange auth: Authentication pattern where short-lived tokens are exchanged for access credentials, securing browser-to-server communication
  • MCP servers: Model Context Protocol servers that provide additional context or capabilities to AI models
Original article

Ship agents to production.

Infrastructure for CLI-based AI agents. Sandboxing, auth, UI, and observability — out of the box.

Building an agent takes a weekend.
Running it in production takes months.

Without 21st

  • Containers & sandboxing
  • Secrets & credential injection
  • Auth & token exchange
  • Logging & tracing
  • Tenant isolation
  • Chat UI components

Weeks of infra work

With 21st

// agents/my-agent/index.ts
export default agent({
  model: "claude-sonnet-4-6",
  tools: { ... },
})
npx @21st-sdk/cli deploy

— done.

Everything you need to run agents in production.

Sandboxed Runtimes

Every agent session runs in an isolated E2B sandbox with gVisor. Boots in seconds, not minutes.

Credential Management

API keys, env vars, secrets — injected securely at runtime. Token exchange auth for browser clients.

Agent UI

Drop-in React components for chat, streaming, and tool rendering. Works with Next.js out of the box.

Observability

Every step traced. Cost per session, latency, errors, token usage — one dashboard.

Three steps. Zero infra.

1. Define

Write your agent in TypeScript. Add tools with Zod schemas. Configure model, system prompt, and MCP servers.

2. Deploy

npx @21st-sdk/cli deploy pushes your agent to a sandboxed, production-grade environment.

3. Integrate

Every agent gets an API endpoint. Embed the React chat UI, or connect via the server SDK.

Code-first. TypeScript all the way.

import { agent, tool } from "@21st-sdk/agent"
import { z } from "zod"

export default agent({
  model: "claude-sonnet-4-6",
  systemPrompt: "You are a helpful assistant.",
  tools: {
    search: tool({
      description: "Search the knowledge base",
      inputSchema: z.object({
        query: z.string()
      }),
      execute: async ({ query }) => ...
    }),
  },
})

Start from a working agent.

Support Agent

Docs-powered Q&A with email escalation

Lead Research

Qualify leads, alert via Slack

Web Scraper

Extract data from any website

Email Agent

Send, read, auto-reply via AgentMail

Docs Assistant

Instant Q&A from your llms.txt

Slack Monitor

Track services, alert on Slack

Start free. Scale when you need to.

Usage

Pay as you go

For developers shipping their first agents.

  • Unlimited agents
  • E2B sandboxed runtimes with gVisor
  • Built-in token exchange auth
  • AgentChat React components
  • Observability & tracing dashboard
  • Environment variables & secrets
  • Claude Code runtime
  • Community Discord support

Scale

Custom

For teams running agents on their own infrastructure.

  • Everything in Usage, plus:
  • On-premise deploy in your VPC
  • SSO & Okta (SAML, OIDC)
  • Immutable audit logs
  • Budget caps per agent & workflow
  • Full run replay with cost breakdown
  • Custom sandbox specs (CPU, RAM, disk)
  • Dedicated support & SLA

Ship your first agent in 5 minutes.