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129 points ericciarla | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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laborcontract ◴[] No.40713024[source]
I really like the stuff coming from Cohere.

I know they're not considered the leader in the foundational model space, but their developer documentation is great, their api is really nice to use, and they have a set of products that really differentiate themselves from OpenAI and Anthropic and others. I'm rooting for the success of this company.

That said, we as an industry need to be moving away from langchain, not more deeply embedding ourselves in that monstrosity. It’s just way too much of its own thing now and you can totally start to see how the VC funding is shaping their incentives. They put everyone who uses it in a position of massive technical debt, create more abstractions like langgraph to lock people into their tools and then and then create paid tools on top of it to solve the problems that they created (langsmith).

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walterbell ◴[] No.40713141[source]

  massive technical debt
  create more abstractions
  create paid tools.. to solve the problems that they created
Ouroboros worked so well for k8s!
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1. TZubiri ◴[] No.40714336[source]
On the one hand yes, that can happen.

On the other hand, it may be a legitimate monetization strategy for Open Source libraries.

Additionally, Langchain does have a role on R&D, you can use it for experimental projects. Simply deduct the self-preservating aspects of it and try to learn from its ideas, test them in non-critical projects. If it works, you can then easily replicate it with an internal tool or just plain code.

Also, it's an Open Source library, how much vendor-lock can you have if you control the code and the server? The actual dependency is on the LLM provider, and if you use something like Meta's LLama you can self-host it as well.