Amazing now I need to fire up my other agent so that it can go in my other laptop, and use the dummy github I use for throwaway agent because this thing is asking to act on my behalf on my github and I don't understand wtf that even means... can it sell my account to another bot, can it add all my data to another drastic leak no one cares about...
What are some alternatives? I've been tinkering with langgraph as of late and frankly the whole space is so polluted with SEO and vibe-coded systems the old "classics" were the safe bet for me.
Langchain the company makes three different main products, all of which are differing levels of bad in my experience.
LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.
LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.
Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
Prime example of the first mover advantage. It's a complete dumpster fire, but they caught enough mindshare early on to be thought of as the default choice now for people newly coming into the agentic world.
It's a coding agent, for those wondering - https://blog.langchain.com/introducing-open-swe-an-open-sour...
Related ongoing thread:
Open SWE: An open-source asynchronous coding agent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44838733 - Aug 2025 (12 comments)
Amazing now I need to fire up my other agent so that it can go in my other laptop, and use the dummy github I use for throwaway agent because this thing is asking to act on my behalf on my github and I don't understand wtf that even means... can it sell my account to another bot, can it add all my data to another drastic leak no one cares about...
And then I can finally use this thing.
Are people still building with lang chain?
Unfortunately, yes. Not by choice.
What are some alternatives? I've been tinkering with langgraph as of late and frankly the whole space is so polluted with SEO and vibe-coded systems the old "classics" were the safe bet for me.
Langchain the company makes three different main products, all of which are differing levels of bad in my experience.
LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.
LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.
Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
Is langfuse the best? It seems nice but I'm not sure what the options are.
basically you build your own by picking and choosing the parts that makes sense for your use case (often with ai)
and you end up with xkcd 927 (standards)
>Are people still building with lang chain?
Prime example of the first mover advantage. It's a complete dumpster fire, but they caught enough mindshare early on to be thought of as the default choice now for people newly coming into the agentic world.