Agency: Pure Go LangChain Alternative

https://github.com/neurocult/agency

by emil14 • 3 years ago

77 38 3 years ago

github.com

emil1415• 3 years ago

Small core, simple api, openai bindings

aldarisbm2• 3 years ago

Any upsides to using this vs writing 30 lines of code?

_lvbh• 3 years ago

I asked the same thing for langchain

aldarisbm2• 3 years ago

Lol, yeah the hidden prompts in langchain, and the bloat turned me off it pretty quickly.

Still kinda nice to get something going in less than a day

eigenvalue• 3 years ago

Langchain is really bad. You’re so much better off just doing whatever you need to do yourself, especially when it comes to interfacing with OpenAI APIs. It has all of the baggage of a big system without any of the benefits.

emil1415• 3 years ago

I think the intention behind langchain is good, but the implementation suffers from bad design. We tried to fix that by having small core with as less abstractions as possible.

emil1415• 3 years ago

Think of ORM for LLMs. That's not the whole purpose of "langchain-like" frameworks but on that is easy to grasp

jamietanna2• 3 years ago

There's no license on this project so the default is All-Rights-Reserved so no one aside from the original author can use it until then

swyx2• 3 years ago

github's Original Sin. we could have so much more software training data if they just defaulted (defaulted! you can opt out instead of opt in) to an oss license. so much software is meant to be open source but pple just forgot/didnt bother/didnt know to slap a license on it

emil1415• 3 years ago

Thank you, fixed, MIT license added

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

I'm using Semantic Kernel (https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel) and it's really nice. Makes building more complex workflows really simple without sacrificing control.

A bunch of examples (https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel/blob/main/dotne...) for how to handle just about anything you need to do with OAI with a lot less boilerplate.

emil1415• 3 years ago

yeah but it's not go (and go-centric)

emil1415• 3 years ago

1) your 30 lines could become 10 lines or something

2) you can write abstract code without explicit dependency on openai and easely switch to e.g. anthropic in future without rewriting the whole thing (think of ORM for LLMs)

3) ready to use abstraction like Process that allows to chain operations (more complex stuff is much easier than writing by hand)

huac4• 3 years ago

I like Go a lot for working with OpenAI etc, it's 'just' API calls and Go is great at that. I've opensourced some bits here: https://github.com/stillmatic/gollum -- in particular, function dispatch (given a prompt, return an arbitrary Go struct) is really nice, as is a very fast in-memory KNN index.

emil1415• 3 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but looks like this is a helper-utility to work with openai API. Agency on the other hand gives you tools to abstract away such things and write high level code

huac4• 3 years ago

definitely serve different purposes, I basically think abstracting away the flows (agency/langchain) is the wrong layer of abstraction, and that it's more useful to abstract away certain problems to solve (eg vector retrieval) or useful patterns (eg function dispatch). another comment mentioned that langchain had hardcoded prompts, which make it difficult to experiment and iterate (easier today, perhaps, when I first used it, it was certainly a mess). where is the complexity hidden?

imo using someone else's abstractions for your entire workflow is a nice way of making a hackathon project, but a terrible way to build a full product.

traviscline3• 3 years ago

This is cool -- I wrote something a bit similar here but uses just raw Go as the source input: https://github.com/tmc/go2oapi

cedws• 3 years ago

Looks nice, although method chaining is not really idiomatic Go and is generally discouraged.

onionisafruit• 3 years ago

Method chaining is a coding idiom. It’s kind of silly to say an idiom isn’t idiomatic. I know I’m being pedantic though.

Still if you tell say something is generally discouraged you should say why. In this case it’s discouraged because it doesn’t mesh well with go’s error handling.

emil1415• 3 years ago

Actually error handling is much easier with agency's Processes (pipelines)

Instead of writing:

result, err := operationFoo(userInput) if err != nil { panic(err }

result, err = operationBar(result) if err != nil { panic(err }

You can create a Process and handle errors only once:

result, err := agency.NewProcess(operationFoo, operationBar).Execute(userInput) // ...

Imagine having 3+ operations, like 5 or 10. That's gonna be some real difference.

All the chained methods like `SetPrompt(...)` returns `agency.Operation` and no error needs to be handled there

emil1415• 3 years ago

Thank you for your comment :)

Why do you think that "method chaining is not really idiomatic" or how this should be implemented?

itake• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, you're using sashabaranov/go-openai, which has different api behavior than the official langchain python package [0].

I was hoping this would be a drop in replacement for langchain (so DS ppl can code in python and gophers can port it to production).

[0] https://github.com/sashabaranov/go-openai#why-dont-we-get-th...

emil1415• 3 years ago

1) Thank you for pointing the moment with 0 temp, I think we can make `agency.TextToTextParams{Temperature *int}` where nil gonna be passed down like `0` and 0 gonna be mapped to `math.SmallestNonzeroFloat32`. We also will add the ability to use seeds though

2) "I was hoping this would be a drop in replacement for langchain" - why don't use use langchaingo then? The thing is - we don't like langchain much. To is it looks too complex, we thing we can do better, simpler. The final goal is to make a library that can replace langchain and/or autogen but it's definitely not gonna be "drop-in" replacement

emil1415• 3 years ago

UPD: bug with temperature fixed in master

traviscline3• 3 years ago

You might be interested in https://github.com/tmc/langchaingo which adheres to some of the conceptual modeling in langchain.

traviscline3• 3 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38475745 / https://github.com/tmc/langchaingo for a closer-to-langchain alternative.

Agency: Pure Go LangChain Alternative

Related Stories