[wilkystyle]

Can you elaborate? Fairly new to langchain, but didn't realize it had any sort of stereotypical type of user.

[int_19h]

I'll admit that I haven't looked it in a while, but as originally released, it was a textbook example on how to complicate a fundamentally simple and well-understood task (text templates, basically) with lots of useless abstractions that made it all sound more "enterprise". People would write complicated langchains, but then when you looked under the hood all it was doing is some string concatenation, and the result was actually less readable than a simple template with substitutions in it.

[phyzome]

Huh, kind of sounds like they used LLMs to design it. :-)

[gcr]

What do you suggest instead? Handrolled code with “import openai”? BAML?

[XCSme]

I am not sure what's the stereotype, but I tried using langchain and realised most of the functionality actually adds more code to use than simply writing my own direct API LLM calls.

Overall I felt like it solves a problem doesn't exist, and I've been happily sending direct API calls for years to LLMs without issues.

[teruakohatu]

JSON Structured Output from OpenAI was released a year after the first LangChain release.

I think structured output with schema validation mostly replaces the need for complex prompt frameworks. I do look at the LC source from time to time because they do have good prompts backed into the framework.

[Insanity]

When my company organized an LLM hackathon last year, they pushed for LangChain.. but then instead of building on top of it I ended up creating a more lightweight abstraction for our use-cases.

That was more fun than actually using it.

[prodigycorp]

No dig at you, but I take the average langchain user as one who is either a) using it because their C-suite heard about at some AI conference and had it foisted upon them or b) does not care about software quality in general.

I've talked to many people who regret building on top of it but they're in too deep.

I think you may come to the same conclusions over time.

[inlustra]

Great insight that you wouldn’t get without HN, thank you! What would you and your peers recommend?

[wilkystyle]

Thanks for the reply, and no offense taken. I've inherited some code that uses LangChain, and this is my first experience with it.