What are some alternatives? I've been tinkering with langgraph as of late and frankly the whole space is so polluted with SEO and vibe-coded systems the old "classics" were the safe bet for me.
Langchain the company makes three different main products, all of which are differing levels of bad in my experience.
LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.
LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.
Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
NeutralCrane|6 months ago
LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.
LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.
Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
awongh|6 months ago
htrp|6 months ago
and you end up with xkcd 927 (standards)