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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

We’ve also been blowing a lot of retainer hours just patching sites instead of building new features. It sucks. Ultimately going to cost clients more.

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It's not like no work is happening though. Your clients are getting a more secure website. Maybe the bugs that are being patched would have taken longer to be exploited in the pre-LLM world but the bugs were still there.

Most clients will not agree to pay extra for a more secure web site though. Unfortunately. Unless they’ve been bitten in the past, which most businesses still haven’t.

As long as you put the alternatives clearly on the table, you could let the customers choose, and sign off on taking the risk. You can give a recommendation, but ultimately it's their choice if they bear the consequences resulting from the choice.

Hard disagree. Framing it this way makes it seem like all possibilities are equally valid options. Yet you’ve somehow winnowed the field of infinity to the several options presented. You did that through successive rounds of professional judgement that eliminated options you did not consider fit to propose.

Taking options off of the client’s table is the core responsibility here.

Eh, letting the customer footgun never comes off well. They will always fundamentally blame your advice or lack of advice.

Um, if you clearly describe what options A, B and C with their costs and consequences are and advice them to go with C but they go with A, then they explicitly did not go with your advice and can't blame you for their choice.

In the end, it's all business decisions. If it's something I don't like as a customer then it's to be infantilized.

(If you disagree then please don't complain ever again about LLMs refusing to help you reverse engineer a piece of code or explain how a virus works.)

Yeah you’re right but for most businesses increased security doesn’t lead to more sales.

I’m not saying that’s right, I’m saying that’s how a lot of businesses think.

Of course this is why hacker news is becoming a list of sites that have been hacked.

Businesses that are paying attention to the winds though have already figured out that the internet is a hostile place: both their insurance companies and their governments are making noise about security.

Probably not, if you factor in the cost of security exploits. A single compromise can potentially sink the business.

> Probably not, if you factor in the cost of security exploits. A single compromise can potentially sink the business.

Agreed however getting humans to understand probability is tricky.

I had this discussion with my son recently about considering the severity of outcome multiplied by the probability of that outcome been the way to look at some things.

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