LangChain and LangGraph: what practitioners need to know

What they do

• LangChain provides building blocks: model wrappers, prompt templates, retrievers and tool interfaces.
• LangGraph models an application as a graph of steps with shared state, which suits agents that loop, branch and wait for people.

What they save you

Common plumbing: connecting to many model providers, loading documents, calling tools and managing state between steps.

What they cost you

• Another layer to learn and to keep up with as it changes.
• Abstractions can hide what is actually sent to the model, which makes debugging harder.

A sensible rule

Start with the model provider’s own client and plain code. Adopt a framework when you are repeating the same plumbing, and make sure you can still see every prompt and tool call. The skill that transfers is the design: tools, state, limits and evaluation.

IICTP is a new independent credential and is not ISO/IEC 17024 accredited.