I spent the last few days playing with LangChain, but it looks like ChatGPT is already building a plugin ecosystem: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins

We may not want to all play in their sandbox?!

For sure! But it seems the interface they developed might be usable by any LLM - there’s nothing inherently OpenAi-esque about it. So if you want to create a tool in the LangChain sense, it seems to me you could create it as a OpenAI plugin, and other LLMs would be able to use it

My greatest hope is that OpenAI’s proof of concept work will galvanize a thousand varied efforts. In a sense, lock-in is harder. Consider that a ten page well written prompt should be more portable than code.