Langchain is a spaghetti rabbit hole. In our consultancy, we've basically switched entirely to Haystack, and keep the abstractions fairly light, really only use it to give the pipelines some structure that applies across projects. Very easy to add custom components with pretty straightforward interfaces. The way you assemble the components isn't everyone's cup of tea (string references), but it does make it very easy…
LangChain Is a Black Box
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Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#12Get rid of it, Langchain really doesn't do anything you can't easily do yourself.
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#13Last I checked Langchain was just basically a pile of helpers? There isn't really a coherent model of anything that's presented to the user, just some light wrappers around stuff. I played around for a bit, it was fine, but I opted to write my own helpers in the end. Did I miss out on some major developments there? Because I don't see why it's a thing that's being talked about everywhere, when it's barely anything.
Langchain is not just basically a pile of helpers. It is *just basically a pile of helpers with 35M in investment*.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/langchain-lands-25m-round-launche...
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#14It is indeed a terrible library on multiple levels. Get rid of it. Just use the "native" Python SDK for the LLMs you are using for your POC.
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#15[flagged]
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#16Howdy! Erick from LangChain here. Would love to learn a bit more about your bug hunting process and see how we can improve the debugging process for everyone else! Could you email me at erick@langchain.dev?
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#17Langchain is frequently crapped on here on HN. Do some searching and you'll see it's pretty much a universal sentiment that langchain is terrible and you shouldn't use it.
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#18We're moving our entire codebase away from Langchain and related products (langgraph, langsmith). I originally thought the library had potential and just needed some polishing which would come with time, but it's just been getting worse and worse. LCEL is the weirdest half-baked idea; it's a nice gimmick that makes your code impossible to debug in a step through debugger. Random stuff breaks with every other release.…
Are you replacing LangGraph with something else? I've luckily avoided LangChain exactly because it's a black box, but been on the lookout for some kind of DAG visualization of LLM flows. LangGraph pops up first on any related searches.
I haven't used LangGraph myself, but the latest magentic release is compatible with it if you'd like to check out the examples here https://github.com/jackmpcollins/magentic/issues/287
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#19It is indeed a terrible library on multiple levels. Get rid of it. Just use the "native" Python SDK for the LLMs you are using for your POC.
I've built a lightweight package that provides a standard interface to the LLM providers, as well as taking care of boilerplate around structured outputs, function calling, and opentelemetry/tracing. It's hopefully a good compromise between ease-of-use and complexity.
Re: LangChain Is a Black Box
#20Remember than LangChain raised $10m a few months ago https://blog.langchain.dev/announcing-our-10m-seed-round-led... (wait, over a year ago!)