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The Problem with LangChain

minimaxir.com

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: The Problem with LangChain

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 has good json support now. It’s nice to be able to give it a a schematic get structured json back.

But why tho? At the start of the chain there's a human and its natural language questions. At the end of the chain there's a human waiting natural language answers. In between you may want some form of data storage, and natural language can be that as well, as it makes retrieval trivial for LLM.

Your end of the chain assumption is wrong, is why ;)

Re: The Problem with LangChain

#92

My primary use of langchain has been to turn text into a vector database with chroma and then query the vector database to return source materials to an LLM to use. I’d much prefer to move away from it because like the author I find LC’s adherence to system prompts is really bad. I can handle all of the agent side of things, I just want relevant source materials from the vector DB as strings — anyone have a better mo…

I've implemented multiple tools that do this and do not use langchain. You just use chroma, the openai sdk and f strings. I can't share the projects because they were implemented for my work and are private.

Re: The Problem with LangChain

#93
To be fair, it started out as a set of ML notes and code snippets to piece together LLM applications. Its popularity resulted in more feature requests and contributions later on. Without a good up-front architecture (or spending time thinking about it), no wonder it starts making creaking noise.

My personal preference is Llama Index by Jerry Liu. It excels at clearer docs + better abstraction.

Re: The Problem with LangChain

#94
happy to see I'm not the only one with this thought. The more I look at langchain code, the more I feel stupid for using it and learning how it works. They have made a basic print("hello world") into

HelloWorldPrint(Baseprint): @validators def input_variables...

bros really just need llm.call(), I ended up rewriting my own tools which goes 10x faster for me personally.

Re: The Problem with LangChain

#97
I disagree. It provides an easy way to let the LLM to use tools, and it has built in tools. Btw, OpenAI's function calling got the idea from LangChain. I did not see this kind of sentiment before the function calling made public. Now everyone think it's garbage ...
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