Comment by 2ndorderthought

5 days ago

You are thinking way too hard. This person is a hazard that needs to learn the hard way.

If velocity means letting agents live edit a db, I'm fine being slow. Holy hell. Let these people crash and burn but definitely let me know the app name so I know never to use it first.

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2ndorderthought

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cowlby  5 days ago

Not everything is a SaaS. I commented this elsewhere but I picture all the business running on spreadsheets/CSVs/MS Access databases on someone's desktop. People delete these all the time by accident. They have no security, no authentication, etc.

An LLM agent (with RW access to a DB), a developer, and a few days these become proper apps that SMB business would pay well for.

Sure don't give an LLM agent access to PII or properly built CRMs etc. But to not see the rest of the landscape seems like a missed opportunity.

  • jmalicki  5 days ago

    At the very least you should give it a non-prod copy of the database, not direct access to the DB actively powering production right now.

    I've done work for a hedge fund where the DB ran directly on the manager's desktop. I worked with my local copy and sent an update script, and he had a second copy he ran on to verify.

    Even with humans you shouldn't be working directly against the prod DB in these cases!

    • cowlby  5 days ago

      Yes, I just think there's a sane way to do things that is not "never let LLM agents do things".

      For dev/prod staging though, there's that other story on HN right now of an LLM agent that maneuvered it's way to prod credentials and destroyed prod. And backups went along with it. I'm paranoid enough to think backups in this use case means out-of-band uncorrelated storage.