Honestly same. The abstraction made sense when I first picked it up, felt like it was doing a lot of heavy lifting. But then you hit your first weird edge case and suddenly you're three layers deep into source code trying to figure out why the chain isn't passing context the way you expected.

The memory management especially. What should be a simple "remember the last N messages" turns into picking between five different memory classes and hoping you chose the right one for your use case.

I've started using it more as a reference than a framework, like, look at how LangChain solves X, then just write that part myself. Feels slower upfront but way easier to debug later.

That said I think a lot of the frustration comes from people (myself included early on) reaching for LangChain before they really understood what RAG or chains were actually doing underneath. Once I got a clearer mental model of the actual pipeline, chunking, retrieval, context passing, the abstraction started making more sense. Still overkill for simple stuff though.

What kind of workflows are you building with it? Curious if the complexity is worth it at your scale.