[cowlby]

LLM agents are unlocking demand and supply for applications that wouldn't have been possible before due to time constraints though. There's a growing demand for single user or smaller scoped apps where giving LLM agents direct access means velocity. The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

[antonvs]

This makes no sense whatsoever.

It's not news that if you just give all developers at a company write access to the production databases, owner permissions on all resources, etc. that velocity can be increased. But at what cost?

The reason we don't do that in most cases is that "move fast and break things" only makes sense for trivial, non-critical applications that don't have any real importance, like Facebook.

[cowlby]

There's thousands of small and medium business though. They have maybe one true CRM, and a dozen spreadsheets/files floating around that would benefit becoming proper apps. People delete spreadsheets all the time!

Sure don't give an LLM agent write access to the modeled CRM that took months/years to build.

But turning a spreadsheet into an app in a few days? By giving the LLM proper read/write capabilities for velocity? I think the case is there for it. Right tool for the right job.

[3form]

I think the argument would be mostly about the companies where such trivialities like proper auth were given up to maximum possible extent. I'm sure even some bigger ones are only gnashing their teeth over implementing security measures that are required by law and not seeing much point to it.

[SegfaultSeagull]

This comment is savage and I’m here for it.

[throw5]

> There's a growing demand for single user or smaller scoped apps where giving LLM agents direct access means velocity. The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

This makes no sense to me. For anything that has sensitive payment or personally identifieable data, direct access to DB is potentially illegal.

> The failure/rollback model is much easier with these as long as we have good backup hygiene.

Have you actually operated systems like this in production? Even reverting to a DB state that is only seconds old can still lose hundreds or thousands of transactions. Which means loads of unhappy customers. More realistically, recovery points are often minutes or hours behind once you factor in detection, validation and operational overhead.

DB revert is for exceptional disaster recovery scenarios, not something you want in normal day-to-day operations. If you are saying that you want to give LLM full access to prod DB and then revert every time it makes a mistake, you aren't running a serious business.

[2ndorderthought]

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.

[cowlby]

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]

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]

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.

[2ndorderthought]

There is literally no excuse. The fact that there is any resistance to this let alone from multiple people terrifies me.

[cowlby]

I just think there's more nuance to it. Some things have an implicit RTO/RPO/SLA of say a day. Risk is also correlated to recovery and rollback. And there's levels of LLMs out there.

Surely in the Venn Diagram of things, there's a slot where it's okay let a Claude Opus agent run on a process with good backups/recovery? Where taking the risk of a 1-hour restore job is worth the LLM agent velocity?

For extra paranoia, surely even Opus/Mythos can't figure out how to destroy log level backups to immutable storage.

[steve_adams_86]

This narrative seems to come from people who haven't worked on meaningfully complex software systems. They're more like script kiddies than software developers. I don't mean that in a derogatory manner. They're right that LLMs are unlocking new possibilities in the realm of their work. They just don't realize that these new possibilities are constrained to relatively simple applications, or very thin slices of complex systems.

I use an LLM to access my database occasionally, but never in production and never with write access. It is genuinely useful. It would never be useful in a production setting, though.

It's worth noting too that people should be wary of what a read only user means in database land. There are plenty of foot guns where writes can occur with read-like statements, and depending on the schema, maybe this would be a rollback-worthy situation. You really need to understand your database and schema before allowing an LLM anywhere near it, and you should be reviewing every query.

[cowlby]

That's the issue that I feel misses the forest for the trees. Relatively simple applications or thin slices exist right now, in production, in critical paths, as spreadsheets/CSVs/files on someone's desktop. That's the pent up demand I picture out there for developers.

Go to any SMB out there and there's a goldmine of processes that could be improved with LLM agents with full RW access to a database. Where backups are sufficient as a recovery mechanism that is better-than-before.

[sroussey]

I think the Venn diagram of people letting LLMs have complete control of their database AND having good backups, will have no overlap. The people that would benefit or not the people that have backups.

[steve_adams_86]

This is also a good point. Details like this are why I think experienced developers are going to remain relevant for a while yet. Anticipating what can go wrong is such a huge component of what building software systems is about. LLMs can be great at it, but only with the limited context they have, and even then only somewhat coincidentally.

[steve_adams_86]

Okay, totally agree. I think good harnesses are crucial but the premise is absolutely valid.

[cowlby]

I'm not thinking of SaaS or properly built apps with an API, modeled databases, etc. I'm thinking spreadsheets/CSVs/MS Access that thousands of SMBs use to power their critical paths and someone accidentally deletes. Typically single user, maybe a small team. Infrequent writes, lots of reads.

[gmueckl]

But are those users allowed to see all the data in the databawe by the law? Some privacy laws require that personal information must be hidden from employees unless they have a narrow and specific business reason to view it. Blanket full access to a database may be illegal for that reason.

[argomo]

I think a lot of the objections to your post could be answered by reminding folks of how Microsoft Access databases tend to pop up in small businesses as well as corporate environments outside of IT departments. Yes, they're not "proper" databases but they /get business done/ and often serve as v0 before a real app can be properly conceived of.

One can easily imagine an LLM-enabled database that lets a wider audience build meat-and-potatoes line-of-business apps for small team use with minimal compliance concerns.

[cowlby]

Yes, that's the right framing. Millions flow through spreadsheets/CSVs/MS Access with none of the auth/backups/architecture people seem to be stuck to.

I saw an article on HN one time about CSVs and how much business still flows through them. Reminds me of the xkcd comic about the one tiny block propping up lots of infrastructure. It stuck with me because it's ripe area for LLM agent based upgrades.

Sure don't give LLMs access to the well architected blocks. But not wanting to improve the brittle areas seems crazy to me even if it's contrarian.

[raincole]

> single user

If you're just vibe coding a tool for yourself, you don't have 'production database' at all even if you use database technology for storage. Just like many Android apps use local sqlite DBs but they're not production databases.

Of course in this case no traditional wisdom about production databases matters to you. In other words, it's off-topic.

[cowlby]

I commented this elsewhere: There's thousands of small and medium business though. They have maybe one true CRM, and a dozen spreadsheets/files floating around that would benefit becoming proper apps. People delete spreadsheets all the time!

Sure don't give an LLM agent write access to the modeled CRM that took months/years to build.

But turning a spreadsheet into an app in a few days? By giving the LLM proper read/write capabilities for velocity? I think the case is there for it. Right tool for the right job.

[nophunphil]

1) Can you explain what demand and supply mean in this context?

2) In regards to having good backup hygiene, who is we?

[cowlby]

I think of all the pent up demand for proper applications that are just infeasible when it would take a developer weeks-to-months to create. Now it's just a few days with an LLM agent.

Examples for me are all the apps that live in a spreadsheet, or in a MS Access database. Or all the crappy ad backed apps on the iOS app store. People wipe full spreadsheets all the time and backups are the only recovery.

Just last weekend I was frustrated with the poor quality of Pokedex type apps that spam ads left and right. Took just one session with Claude Opus to roll a custom Pokedex. It knew internally about things like the PokeApi dataset, Pokemon data modelling etc. To-the-hour snapshots of the database are trivial for bespoke apps like this so the LLM agent velocity seems like an okay trade off for me.

Clearly people don't agree...