I’ll repeat what I’ve said in another thread the other day —
To put together a basic question/answer demo that didn't quite fit the LangChain templates, I had to hunt a bunch of doc pages and and cobble together snippets from multiple notebooks. Sure, the final result was under 30 lines of code, BUT:
It uses fns/classes like `load_qa_with_sources_chain` and `ConversationalRetrievalChain`, and to know what these do under the hood, I tried stepping into the debugger, and it was a nightmare of call after call up and down the object hierarchy. They have verbose mode so you can see what prompts are being generated, but there is more to it than just the prompts. I had to spend several hours piecing together a simple flat recipe based on this object hierarchy hunting.
It very much feels like what happened with PyTorch Lightning -- sure, you can accomplish things with "just a few lines of code", but now everything is in one giant function, and you have to understand all the settings. If you ever want to do something different, good luck digging into their code -- I've been there, for example trying to implement a version of k-fold cross-validation: again, an object-hierarchy mess.
To put together a basic question/answer demo that didn't quite fit the LangChain templates, I had to hunt a bunch of doc pages and and cobble together snippets from multiple notebooks. Sure, the final result was under 30 lines of code, BUT: It uses fns/classes like `load_qa_with_sources_chain` and `ConversationalRetrievalChain`, and to know what these do under the hood, I tried stepping into the debugger, and it was a nightmare of call after call up and down the object hierarchy. They have verbose mode so you can see what prompts are being generated, but there is more to it than just the prompts. I had to spend several hours piecing together a simple flat recipe based on this object hierarchy hunting.
It very much feels like what happened with PyTorch Lightning -- sure, you can accomplish things with "just a few lines of code", but now everything is in one giant function, and you have to understand all the settings. If you ever want to do something different, good luck digging into their code -- I've been there, for example trying to implement a version of k-fold cross-validation: again, an object-hierarchy mess.