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Langchain Is Pointless

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Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#111

Post by TeMPOraL »

minimaxir wrote: post #66

I have a full-on "The Problem With LangChain" blog post in the pipeline, and the reason I made a simple alternative ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393782 ) because I spent a month working with LangChain and coming to the conclusion that it's just easier to make my own Python package than it is to hack LangChain to fit my needs. A few bullet points: - LangChain encourages tool lock-in for little developer be…

> Part of the reason I'm hesitant to release said blog post is because I don't want to be that asshole who criticizes open source software that's operating in good faith.

Beyond the "extreme popularity of LangChain is warping the entire AI ecosystem around the workflows to the point of harming it", hasn't it recently become an attractor for substantial amount of investment money? I'm not saying you should be an ass about it, but the ecosystem will keep getting warped further if knowledgeable people won't speak up, and LangChain doesn't seem to be a random small open source project anymore.

EDIT:

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36647616:

> Remember, this is the project that raised ~$30m from Benchmark and Sequoia.

I think we're past the point of good-faith, small, volunteer-made open source project. If it can take $30M, it can stand some informed criticism too.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#112

Post by weyj4 »

senko wrote: post #39

Remember, this is the project that raised ~$30m from Benchmark and Sequoia. There was a controversial "quality doesn't matter for software products" post and discussion[0] here on HN a few days ago and this is a beautiful example. Product may matter eventually, but you can sure surf the hype for a long time before the reckoning comes (and if you're lucky, you may even be able to get someone else to hold the bag then)…

Thanks for this post, I hadn't seen the linked conversation when it happened. Here's my reading. The conversation blog post you linked begrudgingly points out that companies aren't sunk by bugs, technical debt, or inefficient development practices. If you have a good sales team and a product that people want, need, or will be forced to use, you can succeed even if you have to burn money on dev, ops, customer support. However I think what this langchain conversation is about is overeager VCs and a product that maybe doesn't do anything we need. It's not that langchain is slow or hard to use; it's that we can just do this stuff with Python or whatever. I don't have enough langchain experience to substantiate these claims but I think that's what I'm reading here.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#113

Post by minimaxir »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111
minimaxir wrote: post #66

I have a full-on "The Problem With LangChain" blog post in the pipeline, and the reason I made a simple alternative ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393782 ) because I spent a month working with LangChain and coming to the conclusion that it's just easier to make my own Python package than it is to hack LangChain to fit my needs. A few bullet points: - LangChain encourages tool lock-in for little developer be…

> Part of the reason I'm hesitant to release said blog post is because I don't want to be that asshole who criticizes open source software that's operating in good faith. Beyond the "extreme popularity of LangChain is warping the entire AI ecosystem around the workflows to the point of harming it", hasn't it recently become an attractor for substantial amount of investment money? I'm not saying you should be an ass a…

I'm not worried about LangChain not taking criticism well, it's more the fanboys who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and I don't have the free time to deal with annoying "you're just nitpicking because you're jealous" and "it's open source, why don't you just make a PR to fix everything instead of whining?" messages.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#115

Post by tensor »

LASR wrote: post #85

The reason why Langchain is pointless is that it's trying to solve problems on top of technical foundations that just cannot support it. The #1 learning is that there is no reusability with the current generation of LLMs. We're using GPT-4 and 3.5T exclusively. Over the last several months, my team has been building several features using highly sophisticated LLM chains that do all manner of reasoning. The ultimate o…

And then they release an updated GPT that breaks all your tuned prompts.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#116

Post by meghan_rain »

tensor wrote: post #115
LASR wrote: post #85

The reason why Langchain is pointless is that it's trying to solve problems on top of technical foundations that just cannot support it. The #1 learning is that there is no reusability with the current generation of LLMs. We're using GPT-4 and 3.5T exclusively. Over the last several months, my team has been building several features using highly sophisticated LLM chains that do all manner of reasoning. The ultimate o…

And then they release an updated GPT that breaks all your tuned prompts.

Especially where "updated" actually means "lobomized to be less offensive"

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#119

Post by thelastparadise »

earleybird wrote: post #93
m3kw9 wrote: post #34

Langchain is as pointless as one of those kitchen tools that specifically cuts egg into slices, but you could have done that with a knife.

I like that analogy. I have one of those slicers and every time I use it I have two thoughts. First, this slices so quick and evenly. Second, there's a whole lot more I have to clean up compared to the knife.

I find the egg slicers to be a bit fragile. I'm on my 3rd one. The cutting wires keep breaking.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#120

Post by lyjackal »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #103
krychu wrote: post #98

Using an LLM framework at this moment doesn’t make sense and can be damaging, in my humble opinion. Ways to extract value from LLMs are in early exploration stage. Look at research in prompting: chain of thought, react, reflection, tree of thoughts, zero vs few hot etc. Then completion vs conversational interfacing. Then memory management via vector databases and prompt expansion vs compression vs progressive summari…

[flagged]

I didn’t think gp was recommending writing every thing from scratch, but rather advocating for more piecemeal tools that can be refactored or replaced, rather than buying into a whole framework. Those libraries you mentioned are much lighter weight. I like using guidance partially since it provides a unified interface to language models, but it’s not trying to do too other than managing prompts, output and iteration within prompts
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