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Comment by cowlby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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

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.

The only nuance I can see is, does the data matter at all? If it does you shouldn't do this. If it doesn't then who cares, also why even put it in a database.

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.

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