LangChain is the default 'Swiss Army Knife' of AI engineering—it has a tool for everything, but it's heavy, opinionated, and often frustratingly complex. While it excels at prototyping and handling the plumbing for complex agentic workflows via LangGraph, many senior engineers eventually rip it out in favor of cleaner, direct code for production. Use it if you need broad integrations fast; avoid it if you prefer lightweight, maintainable codebases.
