News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on We no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents. Parent comment

Re:We no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents by ctxc on Friday June 21, 2024 @12:24PM (#40751109)
They were early to the scene, made the decisions that made sense at each point in time. Initially I (like many other engineers with no AI exposure) didn't know enough to want to play around with the knobs too much. Now I do.

So the playing field has and is changing, langChain are adapting.

Isn't that a bit too extreme? Goodwill burnt up? When the field changes, there will be new abstractions - of course I'll have to understand them to decide for myself if they're optimal or not.

React has an abstraction. Svelte has something different. AlpineJS, another. Vanilla JS has none. Does that mean only one is right and the remaining are wrong?

I'd just understand them and pick what seems right for my usecase.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents by causal on Friday June 21, 2024 @12:44PM (#40751314)
You seem to be implying all abstractions are equal, its just use-case dependent. I disagree- some really are worse than others. In your webdev example, it would not be hard to contrive a framework designed to frustrate. This can also happen by accident. Sometimes bad products really do waste time.

In the case of LangChain, I think it was an earnest attempt, but a misguided one. So I'm grateful for LangChain's attempt, and attempts to correct- especially since itis free to use. But there are alternatives that I would rather give a shot first.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents by mikeqq2024 on Sunday June 23, 2024 @05:32AM (#40766034)
What alternatives are you tring and how good/bad about those?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:We no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents by int_19h on Friday June 21, 2024 @05:39PM (#40754100)
I don't think the choices made sense even back when they were made. LangChain always looked like an answer in search of a question, a collection of abstractions that don't do much except making a simple thing more complex.
[ Parent | on HN ]