I'd like to hear more about this – both your reasoning against LangChain and suggestions for alternatives.
My experience with LangChain has been a mixed bag. On the one hand it has been very easy to get up and running quickly. Following their examples actually works!
Trying to go beyond the examples to mix and match concepts was a real challenge because of the abstractions. As with any young framework in a fast moving field the concepts and abstractions seem to be changing quickly, thus examples within the documentation show multiple ways to do something but it isn't clear which is the "right" way.
I'd be really interested to hear what abstractions you would find useful for RAG. I'm building magentic which is focused on structured outputs and streaming, but also enables RAG [0], though currently has no specific abstractions for it.
Those were exactly my thoughts.. however I haven’t been able to find much material on how to implement this without relying on LangChain.. do you know of any beginners material I could use to fill my gaps?
It is abstraction hell, and will set you back thousands of engineers hours the moment you want to do something differently.
RAG is actually very simple thing to do; just too much VC money in the space & complexity merchants.
Best way to learn is outside of notebooks (the hard parts of RAG is all around the actual product), and use as little frameworks as possible.
My preferred stack is a FastAPI/numpy/redis. Simple as pie. You can swap redis for pgVector/Postgres when ready for the next complexity step.