still not sure of the value of the langchain abstraction. does anyone use it in prod?
I think that’s the wrong goal.
Langchain, with its kitchen-sink approach is great for newbies playing around with language models, to get a feel for the different things possible. The uniform interfaces make it very easy to snap together pieces and try things out (iff you don’t care to understand what’s happening under the hood).
Once you know exactly what you need (which might be 10% of Langchain’s capabilities), it might make sense to avoid all the cruft and build your own simple wrappers suited to the task at hand — especially if you need a robust and transparent/debuggable system. Langchain has a little too much indirection, and clumsy abstractions, to be fit for this purpose.