What is the benefit of using Langchain over OpenAI API directly?

[jontstaz]

Hi all,

I just stumbled across this project and I'm intrigued. I've made a lot of web apps using OpenAI's API: AskReddit comment bot, business idea generator, movie suggester, dream interpreter, presentation generator, domain name generator, etc..

Basically I'm wondering what the benefit is of using this project over how I've been doing it (directly via the OpenAI API)? The API is already extremely simple to implement. I've read through a lot of the Langchain docs but it's still not completely clear to me. Perhaps using the context of building some of the apps I listed above would help me understand better.

Thanks in advance!