There's an instinct when you start building agent evals to replicate what the big benchmarks do. You see TerminalBench or SWE-bench or whatever, and there's this nice hill to climb. Model releases improve the score, progress is visible, stakeholders are happy. So you think: why not build an internal version? Start at 10%, iterate throughout the year, end at 80%. Show the chart in your quarterly review.
It doesn't work. Here's why.
The core pitch of LangChain was interchangeability. Plug-and-play components. Swap ChatGPT for Anthropic for Gemini for whatever. Replace your vector database, swap out your tools, mix and match to your heart's content. Build agents from standardized Lego bricks. It sounded great.
I think there's still a place for LangGraph for orchestration. But the rest of it? I don't think LangChain makes sense anymore. Here's why.
I talk a lot about the floor versus the ceiling when it comes to LLMs and agents. The ceiling is the maximum capability when you push these models to the edge of what they can do: complex architectures, novel scientific problems, anything that requires real reasoning. The floor is the everyday stuff, the entry-level human tasks that just need to get done reliably.
For customer service, you want floor models. Cheap, fast, stable. For cutting-edge research or gnarly architectural decisions, you want ceiling models. Expensive, slow, but actually smart.
What I've realized lately is that coding agent workflows should be using both. And most of them aren't.
I recently gave a talk at the LangChain Miami meetup about evals. This blog encapsulates the main points of the talk.
AI agent testing is one of the biggest challenges in building reliable LLM applications. Unlike traditional software, AI agents have infinite possible inputs and outputs, making manual testing inefficient and incomplete. This guide covers practical AI agent evaluation strategies that will help you move from manual testing to automated evaluation frameworks.
I build AI agents for work, and for a long time, I was iterating on them the worst way possible.
The test-adjust-test-adjust loop is how you improve agents. You try something, see if it works, tweak it, try again. Repeat until it's good enough to ship. The problem isn't the loop itself—it's how slow and painful that loop can be if you're doing it manually.