I want to show you a number: 166 MB .

That's how much disk space LangChain takes up. For a library whose entire job is to connect a few LLM API calls together.

Now here's another number: 10 KB .

That's Orbit. A Lua framework that does much of what LangChain does — agents, multi-agent systems, RAG, map-reduce, structured workflows — in roughly 160 lines of code.

Let that sink in.

The Framework Size Wall of Shame

Framework Lines of Code Install Size

LangChain 405K 166 MB

CrewAI 18K 173 MB

LangGraph 37K 51 MB

AutoGen 7K 26 MB

Orbit ~160 ~10 KB

I'm not sharing this to dunk on those projects. I'm sharing it because it forces a real question:

What are we actually paying for?

The Core Idea: LLM Apps Are Just Graphs

Orbit makes one bet: every LLM application is a directed graph. Nodes execute, return a string, and that string routes to the next node. Shared state flows through like a lightweight message bus.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

local fetch = pf .…