LangChain
More info
- Creator
- Harrison Chase
- Released
- Owner
- LangChain Inc.
- Type
- LLM orchestration framework
- License
- MIT
- Website
- langchain.com
- Source
- github.com/langchain-ai
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
The earliest and most popular LLM orchestration framework — components (prompts, chains, agents, memory, tools) for building LLM apps.
Harrison Chase, 2022. LCEL ("LangChain Expression Language") made pipelines pipe-able like Unix commands: prompt | model | parser. Massive ecosystem of integrations (every vector DB, embedder, LLM provider is there).
Criticism: thick abstraction layer, frequent breaking changes, "magic" where it would be faster to call the API directly. The newer LangGraph is an explicit state-machine rethink for agents. Competitors: LlamaIndex (RAG focus), DSPy (prompt optimisation), raw SDK + a bit of code.