Introduction

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Overview

Laminar allows you to store and version your prompts and chains of prompts.

Our pipeline builder lets you quickly iterate on each prompt in your app, but also shape of your LLM logic by chaining prompts together, adding parallel executions, and even self-reflection loops.

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Glossary

Pipeline – an instance of a complete workflow or a chain of prompts.

Commit – an immutable saved snapshot of a pipeline, similar to a git commit. Commit versions can be deployed as targets and called via an API.

Workshop version - a draft version. Every pipeline has exactly one workshop version. Think of it as a git HEAD.

Node – a core component of a pipeline that performs data transformation and passes the result downstream.

Handle – an input or output point of a node. Input handles of one node can be connected to output handles of another one.

Env variable - an environment variable for the project’s scope, which is used for the nodes that require it, for example your model provider API key. Learn more.

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Proxy and version control

Laminar pipeline can act as a proxy to your LLM calls and their prompts. The idea here is that you don’t have to store your prompts in code and anybody from your team can access them on Laminar. Also people can collaborate on prompts in real-time.

For example, if you want to switch models or if something is wrong in the prompt, you can simply

1. edit the prompt,
2. commit the new version, and set it as target,
3. Voilà! Laminar will redirect your calls to this new pipeline target version.

You don’t have to go through another deployment of your entire codebase for every small change.

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Getting started

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1. Experimenting and building

Head to the pipelines page in your project and click “New pipeline”.

You can start from a template or create a blank pipeline.

Connect nodes by dragging from the output handle of one node to the input handle of another node. Edit the prompt, model parameters, and structured output schema of an LLM node by clicking on the gear icon above the node.

Click “Run” to test the pipeline execution. You can also add breakpoints and inspect the output of each node.

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2. Saving and deploying

Once you are happy with your pipeline, click “Commit” to save the current version. Then go to the newly created commit by selecting it in the dropdown in the top-left corner of the pipeline builder.

Then, click “Set as Target” button. This will make the pipeline available for external calls through API or using Laminar’s JS and Python SDKs.

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3. Calling the pipelines

Below, we describe use-cases for calling the pipelines.

Also, check our Python SDK and JavaScript/TypeScript SDK for more details.

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Use as evaluator for a semantic event

Simply pass the name of the pipeline as a value for the evaluator parameter in the evaluate_event function.

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Calling the pipeline via API

You can also call Laminar pipeline from the code of your application.

For a quick start, once you’ve set the version as a target, click the “Use API” button in the commit page. This will show you the code snippet to call the pipeline from your code.

Here’s an example of how to call the pipeline from:

• Python
• JavaScript/TypeScript

from lmnr import Laminar

Laminar.initialize(project_api_key='<YOUR_PROJECT_API_KEY>')
  
result = Laminar.run(
    pipeline = 'my_pipeline',
    inputs = {
        "input_node_name": "input_value"
        "chat_message_input_node_name": [
            {"role": "user", "content": "Hello"},
            {"role": "assistant", "content": "Hi"},
            {"role": "user", "content": "What is laminar flow?"},
        ]
    },
    env = {"OPENAI_API_KEY": "<YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY>"},
    metadata={},
)
print(result)

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Next steps

• Working with nodes
• LLM node in detail
• Learn how to add control flow to your pipeline in the Control flow tutorial