Learning LangChain

Chapter 8. Patterns to Make the Most of LLMs

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LLMs today have some major limitations, but that doesn’t mean your dream LLM app is impossible to build. The experience that you design for users of your application needs to work around, and ideally with, the limitations.

Chapter 5 touched on the key tradeoff we face when building LLM apps: the tradeoff between agency (the capacity to act autonomously) and reliability (the degree to which we can trust its outputs). Intuitively, any LLM application will be more useful to us if it takes more actions without our involvement, but if we let agency go too far, the application will inevitably do things we wish it hadn’t.

Figure 8-1 illustrates this tradeoff.

Figure 8-1. The agency-reliability trade-off

To borrow a concept from other fields¹, we can visualize the trade-off as a frontier ...