Comment by famahar
6 hours ago
Do most devs even look at the source code for packages they install? Or the compiled machine code? I think of this as just a higher level of abstraction. Confirm it works and not worry about the details of how it works
6 hours ago
Do most devs even look at the source code for packages they install? Or the compiled machine code? I think of this as just a higher level of abstraction. Confirm it works and not worry about the details of how it works
For the kinds of things you’d need to reach for an LLM, there’s no way to trust that it actually generated what you actually asked for. You could ask it to write a bunch of tests, but you still need to read the tests.
It isn’t fair to say “since I don’t read the source of the libraries I install that are written by humans, I don’t need to read the output of an llm; it’s a higher level of abstraction” for two reasons:
1. Most Libraries worth using have already been proven by being used in actual projects. If you can see that a project has lots of bug fixes, you know it’s better than raw code. Most bugs don’t show up unless code gets put through its paces.
2. Actual humans have actual problems that they’re willing to solve to a high degree of fidelity. This is essentially saying that humans have both a massive context window and an even more massive ability to prioritize important things that are implicit. LLMs can’t prioritize like humans because they don’t have experiences.
I don’t because I trust the process to get the artifacts. Why? Because it’s easy to replicate and verify. Just like how proof works in math.
You can’t verify LLM’s output. And thus, any form of trust is faith, not rational logic.
I don't install 3rd party dependencies if I can avoid them. Why? Because although someone could have verified them, there's no guarantee that anybody actually did, and this difference has been exploited by attackers often enough to get its own name, a "supply-chain attack".
With an LLM’s output, it is short enough that I can* put in the effort to make sure it's not obliviously malicious. Then I save the output as an artefact.
* and I do put in this effort, unless I'm deliberately experimenting with vibe coding to see what the SOTA is.
> Because although someone could have verified them, there's no guarantee that anybody actually did
In the case of npm and the like, I don't trust them because they are actually using insecure procedures, which is proven to be so. And the vectors of attacks are well known. But I do trust Debian and the binaries they provide as the risks are for the Debian infrastructure to be compromised, malicious code in in the original source, and cryptographic failures. All threes are possibles, but there's more risk of bodily harm to myself that them happening.