What is langchain?
I pasted your question directly into DDG and the entire first page has the answer.
Langchain Is Pointless
51–60 of 192 posts
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#52Since last year, before I heard about langchain, I've been building my own stack of tooling for my own LLM projects that probably now covers about 10-20% of Langchain's functionality. I heard about Langchain earlier this year and groaned, thinking that I did a lot of work for nothing.. ..Then I actually used langchain. I was shocked at how poorly performant the code is. Some operations took 10x longer than how I did…
I had this exact same experience. I was happy to move to something good, but I couldn’t find a lot of benefit. Maybe I’m missing something, but the added complexity is not worth it to me for what it provides.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#53[deleted]
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#54Coming from a frontend background this reminds me a lot of the frontend situation some years ago when it was super common to npm install the stupidest pointless packages.
Of course some people still do, but hard lessons were learned and all experienced people I know are a lot more mindful and cautious what dependencies they add.
It seems to me that this space, and maybe data science more broadly, is currently in that situation. Maybe it's the lack of coding skills, maybe it's the transition from one-off research notebooks to production applications, or maybe it's just the norm to have big do it all libraries (like pandas, scikit etc), idk, but I expect the same lessons will be learned.
For Langchain I wonder how they will keep up with changes in all the things they have their abstractions on. I guess having a huge community helps, but that doesn't help you with compatibility. It would not surprise me if that will get really ugly.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#55Thank god, there is someone else who feels the same way. There are tons of modules and none of them is production ready.
It feels good for hobby / college projects, but would not use it for production.
The pace at which they release features is also scary.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#56I agree, I really don’t like LangChain abstractions, the chains they say are “composable” are not really, you spend more time trying to figure out langchain than actually building things with it, and it seems it’s not just me after talking to many people
Their code seems all rushed, and seems it worked out for initial popularity, but with their current abstractions I personally don’t think it’s a good long term framework to learn and adopt
That’s why I built my own alternative to it, I call it LiteChain, where the chains are actual composable monads, the code is async streamed by default not ducktaped, it’s very bare bones yet but I’m really putting effort on building a solid foundation first, and having a final simple abstractions for users that don’t get in the way, check it out:
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reselling access to Langchain and LLMs
Perfect.. I've seen so many demos showing people feeding data to LLMs so they can "ask questions about their data" but still not seen any real business use cases. Is anyone using these tools in production for a real problem?
The enterprise search domain has evolved quite a bit, utilizing & integrating retrieval-rerank architectures for a few years now. That includes embedding/vector storage, as well as LLM usage (eg using Google T5 for query understanding and model rerank)… there’s some generative modeling but not really like GPT… more like structuring an abstract tree from a complex Boolean query, and sending that tree into an custom retrieval approach over ANN & rerank ensemble.
If you’re doing that type of work in a serious manner you don’t use libraries like langchain or lamaindex. They are a bit late/irrelevant to the engineering that exists in that type of environment.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#58Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#59I agree, I really don’t like LangChain abstractions, the chains they say are “composable” are not really, you spend more time trying to figure out langchain than actually building things with it, and it seems it’s not just me after talking to many people Their code seems all rushed, and seems it worked out for initial popularity, but with their current abstractions I personally don’t think it’s a good long term frame…
Why is this just not ETL, why do you need anything here? There is no new category or product needed here.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#60I've built a few LLM-based projects now and quickly discovered that Langchain was overkill (and not even very good overkill) for my use cases. I thought it was just me, glad to hear it's not.