r/LangChain • u/StrawhatViking • 14h ago

What should I do?

Hi community, I am so confused . I have learnt ReAct loops , prompt engineering, Rag , Vercel AI Sdk few guadrails from the first principals and built minimal terminal agents .

Should I go to Langchain/LangGraph next or should I built some solid project from the things I have learnt and then move to next .

What projects should I build?

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u/DeepEngineeringPackt 14h ago

Try building a research assistant with RAG, a support agent that can use tools and APIs, or a coding assistant with guardrails.

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u/StrawhatViking 13h ago

Can you elaborate more or give some example.

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u/donk8r 13h ago

Build first, and you're further along than the framework route would have put you. Writing ReAct loops by hand is the part most people skip.

LangGraph earns its keep once you need durable state across restarts and branches you can resume. If you haven't hit that yet, picking it up now means learning the abstractions without the problems that motivate them, and you won't be able to tell when it's helping from when it's in the way. The signal to watch for is the moment you catch yourself hand-rolling checkpointing so a crashed run can pick up where it stopped. That's when the framework stops being overhead.

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u/StrawhatViking 11h ago

I honestly didn't understand much 🥲 . Just tell me what's the best thing to do right now and i'll figure out other things eventually

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u/donk8r 11h ago

Fair, that was too abstract. One thing: take the terminal agent you already built and make it survive being killed halfway through a task and restarted.

That's the whole exercise. You'll run into persistence and retries on your own, and when you do look at LangGraph later you'll recognise what it's doing rather than taking its word for it.

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u/StrawhatViking 11h ago

Ok so I think I did that . When the model failed on doing some task it started to find other approaches with the tools and knowledge i already gave to him. Another thing that I blocked listContent tool from seeing the contents of .env, node_modules and some other files . When I asked the agent to list the content of .env , it first tried making a tool call but as soon as it knew that .env is blocked from seeing the content , it ran bash commands such as 'cat .env' to list the content of env . Similar other incidents happend as well

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u/donk8r 10h ago

That's a better find than the restart exercise would have given you. Blocking a tool doesn't remove the capability, it removes one route to it, and with bash on the table every file restriction on a named tool is advisory.

Move the boundary somewhere it can't be routed around. Don't let the process read .env at all, either by loading the secrets into the parent environment and never passing them to the child, or by keeping the file out of the working tree entirely. A restriction the agent can step around was never a restriction.

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u/StrawhatViking 10h ago

Ok sir . I will do this next 🫡 Any other project idea which I should be building along the way??

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u/donk8r 10h ago

None yet. Finish that one first.

Building others along the way is how you end up with six half-agents and nothing that runs. The restart problem will throw enough at you to be a whole project by itself.