[HN Gopher] Understanding LangChain Basic Concepts
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       Understanding LangChain Basic Concepts
        
       Author : oldgun
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2023-07-10 17:37 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.kevinhu.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.kevinhu.me)
        
       | collinc777 wrote:
       | There's a pretty steep learning curve to langchain. I recommend
       | avoiding it if you don't need higher level of abstractions.
        
       | fallingmeat wrote:
       | still not sure of the value of the langchain abstraction. does
       | anyone use it in prod?
        
         | wpride wrote:
         | We do, but mostly as a fairly nice and fairly well-documented
         | interface for plugging together tools like vector DBs and
         | memory with LLMs.
         | 
         | My feeling is that with the agentic/AutoGPT hype fading and
         | OpenAI adding the functions API there's a lot less value in
         | LangChain's abstractions, at least for production use cases.
         | They're still cool for hacking/toys.
        
         | viscanti wrote:
         | Some of the abstractions seem a bit forced, but it seems nice
         | to be abstracted away from how you'd handle vector storage or
         | the LLM that get used (maybe someone launches something that
         | does better than GPT4 on some sets of tasks and a few line
         | change to swap over would be nice).
        
       | yujian wrote:
       | Great conceptual explanation of the different primitives in
       | LangChain. Some possible inspiration for your upcoming piece
       | involving vector stores with LangChain -
       | https://milvus.io/blog/conversational-memory-in-langchain.md
        
       | tehsauce wrote:
       | I'll save yall some time. If you are familiar with concatenating
       | strings, langchain is a library which does just that, only a
       | little less cleanly. Hope this helps!
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-11 23:01 UTC)