Since last year, before I heard about langchain, I've been building my own stack of tooling for my own LLM projects that probably now covers about 10-20% of Langchain's functionality. I heard about Langchain earlier this year and groaned, thinking that I did a lot of work for nothing..

..Then I actually used langchain. I was shocked at how poorly performant the code is. Some operations took 10x longer than how I did it, and all the while producing worse results. As tempting as it is to just roll with langchain from day one, I'd highly advise against it. Think deeply about what you're actually trying to accomplish and instead of just injecting langchain in the middle of everything as this messy, amorphous glue code thing.