Does it introduce more lines of code? Yes
Does it introduce features that you don't need to implement yourself? Yes
Does it make it easy to drop OpenAI? Yes
What's the problem?
Langchain Is Pointless
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#22Sad to hear the news, I have 7 years of langchain experience on my resume, now what am I going to do!?
You should probably not mention it by name on a resume anyway, but emphasize your actual skills, experience, and familiarity with the lower level technologies and APIs that underly it.
This hype train isn't going to last forever, and it's probably better to advertise sustainable, evergreen skills rather than being an expert in the flavor of the week. With that much experience, you shouldn't have to feel tied to any one company's software.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#23the consistency and conventionality of the methods in the langchain library are very sporadic, imo
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#24This 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.
The point is in 99% of use cases no one will ever swap OpenAI or vector storage db for anything else. All Langchain does in these cases is introduces useless abstraction that takes longer to implement and makes things less transparent.
And when you need some customization instead of taking you 10 minutes it takes an hour to work around this abstraction.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#25I found that you need to dig into the actual code and debug it while it is running to see what is going on to actually use the library (both with Langchain and LlamaIndex). That's unfortunate, but it does show a path to get you to where you want to go and is probably faster in the long run than writing your own code because you can swap components (e.g., which LLM or which vector DB) in and out.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#26Sad to hear the news, I have 7 years of langchain experience on my resume, now what am I going to do!?
You should probably not mention it by name on a resume anyway, but emphasize your actual skills, experience, and familiarity with the lower level technologies and APIs that underly it. This hype train isn't going to last forever, and it's probably better to advertise sustainable, evergreen skills rather than being an expert in the flavor of the week. With that much experience, you shouldn't have to feel tied to any o…
Whooosh
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#27I had the same thought about Langchain, and it's essentially my same criticism of most wrapper libraries and SDKs. What are they actually doing that can't be just as easily done with straight up string manipulation and HTTP requests? Usually very little. ORMs might be one of the few exceptions in some cases.
Even so, ORMs sell a similar false promise to Langchain, which is that you can "easily" swap out the underlying thing; a migration that is rare in practice and almost always not that simple.
You might not need Langchain.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#28For me the biggest benefit is just following the project and seeing what the community is doing with llms (It’s also not bad for quick proofs of concept).
That said especially in python it’s not that hard to reimplement things yourself in a cleaner way. Output parsing for agents was nice but with the function update from OpenAI it’s not really necessary (if you’re just using their API)
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#29Sad to hear the news, I have 7 years of langchain experience on my resume, now what am I going to do!?
You should probably not mention it by name on a resume anyway, but emphasize your actual skills, experience, and familiarity with the lower level technologies and APIs that underly it. This hype train isn't going to last forever, and it's probably better to advertise sustainable, evergreen skills rather than being an expert in the flavor of the week. With that much experience, you shouldn't have to feel tied to any o…
It was a joke, langchain was released last year.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#30What business problems are you solving with Langchain and LLMs?
It’s LLM wrappers all the way down