LangChain's CEO says they built their gateway a year too late, and it's still costing them.
I sat down with Harrison Chase, Co-Founder & CEO of LangChain, to talk about what's changed since LangChain started as a side project in 2022, why sub-agents rarely work the way people expect, and why LangChain now runs its own hiring, content, and coding work through internal agents in Slack.
00:00 Why "I use agents for everything" is a red flag in an interview
01:21 How LangChain started as a fall 2022 side project
05:18 From LangSmith to LangGraph: rebuilding as the ground kept shifting
09:06 The gateway LangChain built a year too late
13:23 Code mode: why agents writing code beats human-style tools
19:04 Should the agent run inside the sandbox, or call it as a tool?
28:31 The agent identity problem: whose credentials does it use?
45:43 Running LangChain's own GTM, content, and coding agents in Slack 48:34 The AI slop problem, and why they built a Slack emoji for it
The full pod is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.