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I felt deeply vindicated by their assessment of these frameworks, in particular LangChain. I've built and/or worked on a few different LLM-based workflows, and

I felt deeply vindicated by their assessment of these frameworks, in particular LangChain. I've built and/or worked on a few different LLM-based workflows, and LangChain definitely makes things worse in my opinion. What it boils down to is that we are still coming to understand the right patterns of development for how to develop agents and agentic workflows. LangChain made choices about how to abstract things that are not general or universal enough to be useful.

wahnfrieden 2y ago
The article does not mention the LangChain framework. LangGraph is a different framework, have you tried it?
- rybosome 2y ago
  Yes, our previous lead dev built a lot of our infra using LangGraph. I've been slowly ripping it out since assuming ownership of this part of the codebase. I've been replacing LangGraph with simple primitives, relying on native Python constructs, etc. For example, instead of building this verbose graph of computation with LangGraph, you can just...call functions in the order you want them. Or declare them async, add them to a list, then await the resolution of all of them. For a time I was maintaining a spreadsheet of all the refactor PRs, and I had a cumulative reduction of over 1,000 lines of code from these changes. Eventually I stopped keeping track. ^ That's a 1K LOC reduction with no functionality changes. I feel pretty strongly that LangChain/LangGraph are a net negative for our use case.
  - temp_praneshp 2y ago
    So all you achieved from a spreadsheet's worth of PRs was a 1k LoC reduction?
    - herecomethefuzz 2y ago
      If you do any software engineering all, you would know that a 1k LoC reduction to achieve the same functionality at the same/better performance is non-trivial.
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        They’re questioning whether it was a valuable use of time, not whether a spreadsheet of PRs was time-consuming which is apparent
  - ahmadawais 2y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. Btw what’s your use case?

wahnfrieden 2y ago

The article does not mention the LangChain framework. LangGraph is a different framework, have you tried it?

rybosome 2y ago
Yes, our previous lead dev built a lot of our infra using LangGraph. I've been slowly ripping it out since assuming ownership of this part of the codebase. I've been replacing LangGraph with simple primitives, relying on native Python constructs, etc. For example, instead of building this verbose graph of computation with LangGraph, you can just...call functions in the order you want them. Or declare them async, add them to a list, then await the resolution of all of them. For a time I was maintaining a spreadsheet of all the refactor PRs, and I had a cumulative reduction of over 1,000 lines of code from these changes. Eventually I stopped keeping track. ^ That's a 1K LOC reduction with no functionality changes. I feel pretty strongly that LangChain/LangGraph are a net negative for our use case.
- temp_praneshp 2y ago
  So all you achieved from a spreadsheet's worth of PRs was a 1k LoC reduction?
  - herecomethefuzz 2y ago
    If you do any software engineering all, you would know that a 1k LoC reduction to achieve the same functionality at the same/better performance is non-trivial.
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      They’re questioning whether it was a valuable use of time, not whether a spreadsheet of PRs was time-consuming which is apparent
- ahmadawais 2y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. Btw what’s your use case?