Why you should outsource your agentic infrastructure, but own your cognitive architecture

OpenAI's Assistants API is a significant step towards developing agentic applications by providing essential infrastructure for running such applications. However, it limits the complexity of cognitive architectures that can be built on top of it. While developers appreciate the ability to configure assistants with prompts and tools, run them in the background, and manage state persistence, there is still room for improvement in terms of multithreading and state modification capabilities. The API's generic cognitive architecture makes it challenging to build application-specific architectures needed for reliable agents. LangChain aims to make building agentic applications easier by combining the benefits of OpenAI's infrastructure with customizable cognitive architectures through its LangGraph Cloud platform, allowing developers to focus on their unique application features.