I recently saw a tweet from Sam Bhagwat (Mastra AI's Founder) which mentions that around 60–70% of YC X25 agent companies are building their AI agents in TypeScript.
This stat surprised me because early frameworks like LangChain were originally Python-first. So, why the shift toward TypeScript for building AI agents?
Here are a few possible reasons I’ve understood:
- Many early projects focused on stitching together tools and APIs. That pulled in a lot of frontend/full-stack devs who were already in the TypeScript ecosystem.
- TypeScript’s static types and IDE integration are a huge productivity boost when rapidly iterating on complex logic, chaining tools, or calling LLMs.
- Also, as Sam points out, full-stack devs can ship quickly using TS for both backend and frontend.
- Vercel's AI SDK also played a big role here.
I would love to know your take on this!
I think ppl underestimate the cost of context switch between languages, even if you're really proficient in more than one.
If you're a team with 1-2 eng and have to build a frontend, you are forced to use js/ts. Now, if you can keep everything in a monorepo in the same language, you're simply moving faster. And I'm sure people will criticize and bring counter examples... but statistically 60-70% of the teams will just be faster working this way.
My first startup was frontend php, backend python, 2 eng; soon we specialized one working on frontend, the other on backend, it's tedious to context switch. My last startup was typescript for everything, again 2 eng, same code base, same coding style, both iterating on all code. (And daily I work in rust & C, I'm definitely not a frontend eng nor a js/ts enthusiast, I'm just reflecting on efficiency.)
reply