Friday, 31 May, 2024 UTC
Summary
My main scope for this article is to detail why learning LangChain is a worthwhile investment, both for seasoned and beginner JavaScript developers.
As a disclaimer, just wanted to let you know that yesterday was the official launch date of the 📘 LangChain for JavaScript Developers book.
LangChain is a framework designed to make it easy for developers to integrate AI features into their applications. Just look at the NPM usage graph for LangChain.js, and you’ll see it’s rising rapidly:
And there’s a good reason for this growth!
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Llama, or Mistral are peculiar tools for web developers. They work in a random-ish, unstructured, and nondeterministic way. Here are just some of the challenges we face when working with LLMs:
- they can give different answers or formats despite clear instructions
- they can be slow and expensive
- they are stateless; don't have any short or long-term memory
- they can't use external information outside their training data
- they can hallucinate and provide misleading info.
LLMs are extremely powerful, but to work with them efficiently, you need to understand their nuances.
And this is where LangChain steps in. The framework encapsulates in one package all the abstractions and concepts you need when adding AI-powered features to a web app.
Having a solid foundation in LangChain provides a structured and well-organized approach to integrating LLM features.
By the way, both Andrej Karpathy (ex OpenAI and ex Director of AI at Tesla) and Shawn Swyx Wang (co-founder of Latent Space podcast) mentioned that in the near future, there will be more AI Integration Engineers than traditional Machine Learning Engineers (source 1 and source 2).
LangChain it's one of the few that has both Python and JavaScript implementations. This is great news for us web developers, as we can use our hard-earned JS experience to communicate with AI models.
It can be seen as the orchestrator that connects nearly everything in the AI-Webapp integration system. This makes it an excellent gateway for understanding how all the components work together.
Whether you're learning LangChain to build that side project you’ve been dreaming about, to gain an edge in the job market, or simply to stay sharp in the constantly evolving JS world, it is a worthwhile investment.
This is why I've written the 📘 LangChain for JavaScript Developers book.
Can you work with AI models without LangChain? Yes, you can. You can also learn LangChain without a book. But I think that using a carefully curated framework, or book, will save you time, frustration, and money.
Overall, I believe that learning LangChain can make you a better and more valuable developer across the board as it can provide you with a starting toolset to make your first septs toward AI engineering.
If you are interested in the book you can still get from here a 50% discount code.
I am here for any questions you may have. Just leave a comment and will be happy to reply.