and you end up with xkcd 927 (standards)

LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.

LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.

Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.