The AWS Developers Podcast Building AI Agents with the Strands SDK
Oct 17, 2025
Arron Bailiss, Principal Engineer and Tech Lead for Strands Agents at AWS, brings his expertise to the discussion on building AI agents with the open-source Strands SDK. He shares how Strands evolved from an internal tool to a developer-friendly solution. Listeners will discover the framework's unique model-driven approach, simplified multi-agent systems, and how it powers AWS services like Amazon Q Developer. Arron also reveals exciting roadmap plans, including TypeScript support and voice capabilities for future agent development.
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Model-Driven Agent Framework
- Strands is an open-source, model-driven SDK that pairs a model with tools to build agents.
- It emphasizes low friction for developers and production-readiness beyond toy demos.
Born Inside AWS, Validated In Production
- Strands started as an internal AWS framework used to build Amazon Q Developer and other services.
- Internal production use drove improvements before Strands was open-sourced.
Iteratively Build From Defaults
- Start with the simple Agent class and sensible defaults, then customize prompts, model and tools.
- Add observability and other bolt-on features as you scale to production.