1 Overview
Recently I’ve looked into the LangChain project and I was surprised by how it could be such a powerful and mature a project built in such short span of time. It covers many essential tools for creating your own LLM-driven projects, abstracting cumbersome steps with only a few lines of code.
I like where the project direction is going, and the development team has been proactively including and introducing new ideas of the latest LLM features in the project.
The path to understanding this new project weren’t really smooth. It has its own opinions for code organization and it could be unintuitive to guess how to hack your own projects for more than the tutorials. Many of the tutorials out there explains how to create a small application with LangChain but doesn’t cover how to intuitively comprehend the abstraction and design choices.
Hence I have taken the initiative to document my personal cognitive process throughout this journey. By doing so, I aim to clarify my own understanding while also providing assistance to y’all who are interested in hacking LangChain for fun and profit.
This blog post will dedicate to the overall understanding of all the concepts. I found it really helpful to start by understanding the concepts that directly interacts with the LLM, especially the core API interfaces. Once you have the mindmap of all the LangChain abstractions, it’s much more intuitive to hack and extend your own implementation.