We use langchain and don't regret it at all. As a matter of fact, it is likely that without lc we would've failed to deliver our product.
The main reason is langsmith. (But there are other reasons too). Because of langchain we got "free" (as in no development necessary) langsmith integration and now I can debug my llm.
Before that it was trying to make sense of whats happening inside my app within hundreds and hundreds of lines of text which was extremely painful and time consuming.
Also, lc people are extremely nice and very open/quick to feedback.
The abstractions are too verbose, and make it difficult, but the value we've been getting from lc as a whole cannot be overstated.
other benefits:
* easy integrations with vector stores (we tried several until landing on one but switching was easy)
* easily adopting features like chat history, that would've taken us ages to determine correctly on our own
people that complain and say "just call your llm directly": If your usecase is that simple, of course. using lc for that usecase is also almost equally simple.
But if you have more complex use cases, lc provides some verbose abstractions, but it's very likely that you would've done the same.
The main reason is langsmith. (But there are other reasons too). Because of langchain we got "free" (as in no development necessary) langsmith integration and now I can debug my llm.
Before that it was trying to make sense of whats happening inside my app within hundreds and hundreds of lines of text which was extremely painful and time consuming.
Also, lc people are extremely nice and very open/quick to feedback.
The abstractions are too verbose, and make it difficult, but the value we've been getting from lc as a whole cannot be overstated.
other benefits:
* easy integrations with vector stores (we tried several until landing on one but switching was easy)
* easily adopting features like chat history, that would've taken us ages to determine correctly on our own
people that complain and say "just call your llm directly": If your usecase is that simple, of course. using lc for that usecase is also almost equally simple.
But if you have more complex use cases, lc provides some verbose abstractions, but it's very likely that you would've done the same.