Langchain Is Pointless
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Langchain Is Pointless
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Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#2I don't know enough to agree that it's pointless, but I'd agree that when I looked at it I saw a lot of abstraction of already simple stuff (like the examples the post gives) and decided that for what I was doing it would be faster and easier to understand to just write my own python script. Though I can picture for very inexperienced developers the abstractions may be helpful short term?
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#3This guy's analysis is terrible. I literally built a retrieval augmented generation with memory in langchain last night (comments claim you can't do this)
Sure, langchain has poor documentation and useless helper functions. That doesn't mean that it's pointless.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#4It's easy to hate on langchain. Sure, the architecture isn't the best but it's where the crowd is so it's a safe bet
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#5I've definitely got heartache here, and they merit criticism, but it is real
We need a lot of pluggability to support diff vendor LLMs and BYO LLMs in Louie.ai, so having langchain has been nice for helping code to interfaces vs vendor lockin. It definitely has growing pains - ex: sync & multithreading is important for us so we are generally coding around langchain while that smooths out. Likewise, we ended up building much of our conversational and multitool capabilities as custom libraries vs using theirs for similar quality reasons. We can't use any of the codegen capabilities because they are massive security holes so doing our own work there too.
If anyone is into that kind of work (backend, AI & web infra, ...), definitely hiring for core platform & cool customer projects here: louie.ai / Graphistry.com/careers
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#6I have done a bit of research trying to figure out why anyone would use langchain. The main two reasons I’ve found are these:
1. Newbies that want to play with LLMs don’t know where to start or what the major building blocks even are. Despite the complaints here about documentation their getting started docs will walk you through the concepts. Going from total ignorance and confusion to now having a rough understanding of loading a prompt with chat history, using an embeddings database, calling a completions endpoint, etc. will make people feel accomplished. And then lang chain has earned some loyalty just because they were there for you first.
2. In the case that you don’t know which embedding db, AI host, or model you want to use you can quickly swap those in and out and measure the results. That means there’s little reason to complicate your back end code with lang chain (I’ve always just written my own abstraction layer to make this possible with very few lines of code). But for a python notebook it can make sense.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#7I tried using langchain.js after a bit of hype and overwhelming dev support and incremental releases, but it became added complexity for no reason for our case.
OpenAI's NPM is much easier to use. A lot of what langchain promised out of the box didn't work like caching. Anyways it's still beta i believe
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#8const THE_LEFT_HANDED_IDEAL_FOR_THE_EVEN_NUMBERS_OF_THE_NATURAL_NUMBERS_UNDER_MULTIPLICATION = 2
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#9What business problems are you solving with Langchain and LLMs?
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#10It's easy to hate on langchain. Sure, the architecture isn't the best but it's where the crowd is so it's a safe bet
That just makes it easier to hate. Our collective tendency to build atop mediocre foundations just because they got popular first is exhausting.