I agree it's not so easy to work with Langchain.
That's wy I built the simple LLM agents repo which you can understand in 5 minutes:
Langchain Is Pointless
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Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#72I have looked for the value and never really found it. It seems to mostly be (bad) abstractions around things you could easily do without langchain. Take one of the most important llm things: prompt templates. What does langchain add over a simple function and an f string? Maybe I'm missing the point, but I can't find anything. Anyway, it seems people like it so who am I to judge, but I don't like making our codebase…
I agree, and that's why I've been working on AIPL[0]. Our first v0.1 release should be in the next few days. https://github.com/saulpw/aipl It's basically just a simple scripting language with array semantics and inline prompt construction, and you can drop into Python any time you like.
With peace and love, why would I not just write some code?
LLM pipelines are not very complex: it's string manipulation, api calls, and storage, there is not much more too it. All are quite easy to do, often needing nothing else but the standard library.
For more complex cases or bigger scale you have a plethora of battle tested solutions to manage things like queues, back off and retries, concurrency, etc.
Maybe it's me missing the point (again), but I wonder what the added value is of learning a new language to do things that are super easy to do in Python/JS/whatever my language of choice is? Or maybe I'm just not be your target audience, very possible.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#73Does 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?
You'll still need to re-tune your prompt and the hyperparameters when switching models. So the actual effort of switching models is not improved much if at all.
This. I'll still use langchain for token/cost counting and some nice abstractions on top of the LLM, and the document loader system is semi-useful, but all of the retriever/chain stuff abstracts away the most important part - the prompt.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#74At one point I got so frustrated with langchain that I wrote my own stuff in go: https://github.com/ryszard/agency
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#75I 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.
Just saw the video you shared on the other comment using prophecy, very cool
Generally I don’t care much about the embedding and retrieval and connectors etc for playing with the LLMs, I imagined much more robust tools were available already indeed, my focus was more on the prompt development actually, connecting many prompts together for a better chain of thought kinda of thing, working out the memory and stateful parts of it and so on, and I think there might be a case for an “LLM framework” for that, and also a case for a small lib to solve it instead of an ETL cannon
However, I am indeed not experienced with ETLs, have to play more with the available tools to see if and how can I do the things I was building using them
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#76I keep going back to LangChain thinking it just hasn't found its legs yet, but every time I do I retreat exasperated. I don't find their abstractions useful or intuitive, and their documentation is woefully scattered and incomplete. Things are moving so quickly with LLMs that theirs is no easy task, but so far they haven't really cracked the nut of making LLM app development easier.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#77I've been using the JS version of langchain for a few months now, and despite there being a lot of valid criticism, (especially around the abstractions it provides) I'm still glad to be using it.
We get the benefits of a well used library, which means making certain changes is easy. For example, swapping our vector database was a one line change, as was swapping our cache provider. When OpenAI released GPT-4, we were able to change one parameter, and everything still just worked.
Sure, it's moving fast, and could use a lot better documentation. At this point, I've probably read the entire source code several times over. But when we start testing performance of different models, or decide that we need to add persistent replayability to chains of LLM calls, it should be pretty easy. These things matter to production applications.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#78I've been using the JS version of langchain for a few months now, and despite there being a lot of valid criticism, (especially around the abstractions it provides) I'm still glad to be using it. We get the benefits of a well used library, which means making certain changes is easy. For example, swapping our vector database was a one line change, as was swapping our cache provider. When OpenAI released GPT-4, we were…
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Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha! I guess I don't really get the joke, but relieved for gp's sake it is one, despite the egg on my face.
* didn't really get the joke, If you don't get it now, I'm worried about you:)
No no, that is the right tense! I thought initially it was like light sarcasm targeting the conceit of the reddit post, i.e., "how could it be pointless if I have amassed all this experience." Beyond that.. not sure (I'm not that smart).
Perhaps its just something like: "the scandal that this library is bullshit amounts to not a lot considering it's still pretty new thing." But the, erm, strong showing of downvotes of my original post makes me think its a better bit than that!
Indulge me with the joke if you'd like, but don't worry about me! I'm doing pretty good, despite my slow mind.
Re: Langchain Is Pointless
#80I've been using the JS version of langchain for a few months now, and despite there being a lot of valid criticism, (especially around the abstractions it provides) I'm still glad to be using it. We get the benefits of a well used library, which means making certain changes is easy. For example, swapping our vector database was a one line change, as was swapping our cache provider. When OpenAI released GPT-4, we were…
> When OpenAI released GPT-4, we were able to change one parameter, and everything still just worked.
Wouldn't that be the same if you used the OAI js library directly? Basically swapping the model parameter?