httpx VS simpleaichat

For reference, it's a butterfly, not a moth.

Source: https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/834

Very cool, first I'm hearing of httpx https://www.python-httpx.org/

I think most people would start with trying out requests or something for this kind of work, I'm guessing that didn't work out? You've got a star from me.

To access 10 different commands at the same time, that is tricky but definitely doable.

First thing that comes to mind, you can use aliases.

To keep it simple, lets use 3 examples instead of 10: harlequin (this project), pgcli (https://www.pgcli.com/) and httpx (https://www.python-httpx.org/)

Setup a main home for all your venvs:

    cd ~

There are already some implementations for Python HTTP clients. One of them is aiometer. But it's not suitable for my use case. Since httpx already has the internal pool, it would be better to reuse the design.

Besides, flama also provides support for SQL databases via SQLAlchemy, an SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL. Finally, flama also provides support for HTTP clients to perform requests via httpx, a next generation HTTP client for Python.

We can use the async HTTP client provided by httpx, a fully featured HTTP client for Python with an API broadly compatible with requests, so it can be used in pretty much the same way in most cases.

httpx in place of requests library

The main value of Requests is that it provided an abstract interface on top of HTTP, which was designed well-enough to become a standard. But today it has fallen way behind in its field, and there are much better alternatives such as HTTPX [0].

[0] https://www.python-httpx.org/

HTTPX is a popular Python library that provides an asynchronous HTTP client, and it can be beneficial for enabling async support in Django. While Django itself does not require HTTPX for async support, using HTTPX in combination with Django's async views can bring several advantages:

The underlying library for both sync and async is httpx (https://www.python-httpx.org/) which may be limited from the HTTP Client perspective but it may be possible to add rate limiting at a Session level.

I checked both the issues mentioned, people have been respectful and showing empathy to author's situation

https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/issues/91

https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/issues/92

ChatGPT's June updated added support for "function calling", which in practice is structured data I/O marketed very poorly: https://openai.com/blog/function-calling-and-other-api-updat...

Here's an example of using structured data for better output control (lightly leveraging my Python package to reduce LoC: https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/blob/main/examples... )

So what are the alternatives to LangChain that the HN crowd uses?

I see two contenders:

https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/tree/main/simpleai...

https://github.com/griptape-ai/griptape

There is also the llm command line utility that has a very thin underlying library, but which might grow eventually:

A fun note is that even with system prompt engineering it may not give the most efficient solution: ChatGPT still outputs the avergage case.

I tested around it and doing two passes (generate code and "make it more efficient") works best, with system prompt engineering to result in less code output: https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/blob/main/examples...

I played around with simpleaichat for a few minutes just now, and I really like it. Unlike LangChain, I can understand what it does in minutes, and it looks like its primitives are fairly powerful. It looks like it's going to replace the `openai` library for me, it seems like a nice wrapper.

I'm especially looking forward to playing with the structured data models bit: https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/blob/main/examples...

Well done, Max!

https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat bills itself as a simpler alternative to langchain. I have not tried it, but it looks interesting.

I think you are asking specifically about practical LLM engineering and not the underlying science.

Honestly this is all moving so fast you can do well by reading the news, following a few reddits/substacks, and skimming the prompt engineering papers as they come out every week (!).

https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer provides an early manifesto for this nascent layer of the stack.

Zvi writes a good roundup (though he is concerned mostly with alignment so skip if you don’t like that angle): https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-18-the-great-debate-debates

Simon W has some good writeups too: https://simonwillison.net/

I strongly recommend playing with the OpenAI APIs and working with langchain in a Colab notebook to get a feel for how these all fit together. Also, the tools here are incredibly simple and easy to understand (very new) so looking at, say, https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat/tree/main/simpleai... or https://github.com/smol-ai/developer and digging in to the prompts, what goes in system vs assistant roles, how you gourde the LLM, etc.

This notebook from the repo I linked to is a concise example, and the reason you would want to optimize prompts.