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Langchain Is Pointless

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Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#171

Post by cetico »

tryfinally wrote: post #151
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…

> Debugging a LangChain error is near impossible, even with verbose=True. (A while ago) I tried using LangChain and shortly gave up after not finding any way whatsoever to actually debug what’s going on under the hood (eg. see the actual prompts, LLM queries). It’s pretty ridiculous that this isn’t basic functionality, or at least it isn’t very discoverable. I cannot imagine spending extended time with a framework wi…

Can’t you simply create a custom LLM interface that does whatever query logging you want?

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#172

Post by pkc_official »

sandGorgon wrote: post #145
Tostino wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've got a few thousand lines of langchain code now for a data cleaning pipeline... I've been fighting it every step of the way. Trying to replace sections of the pipeline to use a local LLM instead of OpenAI has had me have to replace the templates entirely, the chat based templates won't allow me to assign the proper user/assistant names, so the performance for the local LLM is terrible (stupid). They have zer…

I have an attempt in the same domain, would love feedback We think - Generative AI is config management. We model it on top of config management grammar that is proven to work at K8s/Terraform scale - jsonnet. https://github.com/arakoodev/EdgeChains/blob/main/Examples/r... Prompts live outside the code. We didnt invent a new markup - we used jsonnet which is used in large scale kubernetes and has a grammar that has b…

We thought the same thing with https://neum.ai - config management/infra as code for your LLM app, using plain JSON, though we are abstracting even more what LangChain does. Not suitable for the audience here given the level of customizations some folks want.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#173

Post by pkc_official »

resiros wrote: post #70

I believe the abstractions in Langchain are inherently flawed. The core problem resides in the composability of chains. While it offers a handy way to create prototypes, it becomes restricting when you desire to modify a specific element within the chain. The hierarchical design of chains in Langchain conceals the component you wish to alter and obscures the parts developers might want to adjust, making the process o…

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Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#174

Post by [deleted] »

lmeyerov wrote: post #5

I've definitely got heartache here, and they merit criticism, but it is real We need a lot of pluggability to support diff vendor LLMs and BYO LLMs in Louie.ai, so having langchain has been nice for helping code to interfaces vs vendor lockin. It definitely has growing pains - ex: sync & multithreading is important for us so we are generally coding around langchain while that smooths out. Likewise, we ended up buildi…

[deleted]

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#175

Post by pkc_official »

crosen99 wrote: post #76

I 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.

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Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#176

Post by [deleted] »

ramoz wrote: post #57
cloudking wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#177

Post by cdl »

IMO it's a great educational tool to understand how to build AI apps at least at a high level. It provides a good mental model. Can someone name another single resource that achieves the same?

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#179

Post by vegetax »

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…

yes! whenever I try to understand langchain, it makes me more motivated to create it myself.

Re: Langchain Is Pointless

#180

Post by shepardrtc »

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.

Please release it. People need to see these things BEFORE they get sucked into building an entire product around it.

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