I've seen a lot of stuff recently about how LangChain and other frameworks for AI/LLM are terrible and we shouldn't use them and I can't help but think that people are missing the point. If you need strong customization or flexibility frameworks of any kind are almost always the wrong choice, whether you're building a website or an AI agent. That's kind of the whole point of a framework. Opinionated workflows that enable a specific kind of application. Ideally the goal is to cover 80% of the cases and provide escape hatches to handle the other 20% until you can successfully cover those too.

As someone new to the space I have zero opinions of whether LangChain is better than writing it all yourself, but I can certainly say that, I at least, appreciate having a proscribed way of doing things, and I'm okay with the idea that I may get to a place where it no longer serves my needs. It's also worth noting that the benefit of LangChain is the ability to "chain" together these various AI links. Is there a better easier way to do that? Probably, but LangChain removes that overhead.