←back to thread

Pydantic Logfire

(pydantic.dev)
146 points ellieh | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.412s | source
Show context
serjester ◴[] No.40212723[source]
I love pydantic but I really have to wonder why they chose this route. There's already a ton of companies that do this really well and I'm trying to figure out how their solution is any different.

The llm integration seems promising but if you care about LLM observability you probably also care about evals, guardrails and a million other things that are very specific to LLM's. Is it possible to build all this under one platform?

I do hope I'm wrong for the sake of pydantic-core.

replies(3): >>40212966 #>>40214112 #>>40214695 #
wferrell ◴[] No.40214112[source]
Who do you like who does this well?

I think Pydantic is great software and so I am inclined to see if this too will be great software.

replies(3): >>40214480 #>>40215321 #>>40219124 #
1. emmanueloga_ ◴[] No.40215321[source]
Looks like "Pydantic Logfire" is another entry on the category of "APM"s? [1]

Gotta echo the sentiment that Logfire doesn't seem to be too closely related to Pydantic... Also, afaict it looks like the frontend is not open source, unless I'm missing something [2]. So, not a tool that one could self-host?

--

1: https://github.com/topics/apm

2: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire/

replies(1): >>40217527 #
2. threecheese ◴[] No.40217527[source]
I’ve observed that Pydantic - which we’ve used for years in our API stack - has become very popular in LLM applications, for its type-adjacent features. It serves as a foundational technology for prompting libraries like [DSPy](https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy) which are abstracting “up the stack” of LLM apps. (some opinions there)

Operating AI apps reveals a big challenge, in that debugging probabilistic code paths requires more than the usual introspective abilities, and in an environment where function calls can have very real monetary impact we have to be able to see what’s happening in the runtime. See LangChain’s hosted solution (can’t recall the name) that allows an operator to see prompts and responses “on the wire”. (It just occurred to me that Langchain and Pydantic have a lot in common here, in approach.)

Having a coupling between Pydantic - which is *just about* the data layer itself - and an observability tool seems very interesting to me, and having this come from the folks who built it does not seem unreasonable. WRT open source and monetization, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried - given the recent few months - but I am choosing to see this in a positive light, given this team’s “believability weight” (to overuse Dalio) and history of delivering solid and really useful tooling.