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I had the same thought about Langchain, and it's essentially my same criticism of most wrapper libraries and SDKs. What are they actually doing that can't be ju

I had the same thought about Langchain, and it's essentially my same criticism of most wrapper libraries and SDKs. What are they actually doing that can't be just as easily done with straight up string manipulation and HTTP requests? Usually very little. ORMs might be one of the few exceptions in some cases. Even so, ORMs sell a similar false promise to Langchain, which is that you can "easily" swap out the underlying thing; a migration that is rare in practice and almost always not that simple. You might not need Langchain.

refulgentis 3y ago
It's a really interesting question: the converse of this is its _really_ tricky nailing all this down, much harder than you'd think -- see the GPT4 GA thread earlier this week for people who swear up and down the OpenAI API acts in bizarre ways, you'll note that it almost seems fantastical that it could be that bizarre: it is fantastical. If you're truly used to it, it reads like "hey I have auto retries enabled in my HTTP client framework. p.s. whats 'context size'?" But Langchain is far, far, _far_ away from being truly helpful with that. It's glorious that we're 5 months into GPT-4 and most people either got bored or are building on rickety rushed structures in Python to rush out a proof of concept web app.