3 ms·

CDK/Pulumi are going to be used by LLMs to spin up website infra exactly to spec. Devs will fill in the business logic interfaces. Going to be wild

smt88 3y ago
Why would you need LLMs for a boilerplate web application?
- verdverm 3y ago
  There is a "need" vs "want" aspect here, but often the boilerplates that we reach for become out of date. In theory, an LLM producing these could remain up to date without maintenance, key phrase "in theory"
  - trufas 3y ago
    There's no guarantee the boilerplate an LLM spits out will be up to date. It'll almost definitely have some outdated code in it's dataset that it can reference.
    - verdverm 3y ago
      yes, a basic LLM is susceptible to this. The other major issue is that they will generate different output, even with the same input. There is work going into giving the LLMs access to external data & systems. This is my basis for saying they will be able to stay up to date. I have a very different approach I'm working on: https://docs.hofstadter.io/getting-started/creators https://docs.hofstadter.io/getting-started/creators (human-made blueprints that can be started from and later updated to bring in the upstream changes)
JohnMakin 3y ago
but how will it be maintained? "IAC" seems like a bit of a misnomer here, if I'm understanding correctly. Now, if Pulumi generated terraform for me to maintain, that'd be a different matter, but this article seems to just produce cloud resources based on LLM prompts, which are not deterministic at all.
- twalla 3y ago
  It produces pulumi programs which are the equivalent of a terraform module or main.tf file. Whether or not said programs are deterministic is another matter.
- dmattia 3y ago
  Pulumi is an IAC tool similar to Terraform (it actually usually calls terraform providers over gRPC under the hood), just written in languages like Typescript/Python. I think the intention would be to use this AI prompt thing to generate pulumi and then to insert it into your codebase, just like you'd do with terraform, and then it becomes deterministic. I've used ChatGPT and other tools to generate Pulumi before, so I'm not totally sure how this specific tool from Pulumi is different, but I'd guess they've somehow trained it more specifically on their sdks/docs or something
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    thanks for the clarification
shadycuz 3y ago
Yeah but ChatGPT can already write Terraform and Cloudformation really well. So this doesn't seem that special besides it's already baked into the pulumi eco system.
gtirloni 3y ago
> exactly to spec And that spec is?
- fdgsdfogijq 3y ago
  Natural language :)
  - diarrhea 3y ago
    Reminds me of UML. Instead of laboriously hand-writing all this nasty code, why not use a tool that can autogenerate it for us? After all, all that’s needed is a spec (UML)! Of course, the spec is the work. LLMs are then just very potent at translating it to be machine-readable.

smt88 3y ago

Why would you need LLMs for a boilerplate web application?

verdverm 3y ago
There is a "need" vs "want" aspect here, but often the boilerplates that we reach for become out of date. In theory, an LLM producing these could remain up to date without maintenance, key phrase "in theory"
- trufas 3y ago
  There's no guarantee the boilerplate an LLM spits out will be up to date. It'll almost definitely have some outdated code in it's dataset that it can reference.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    yes, a basic LLM is susceptible to this. The other major issue is that they will generate different output, even with the same input. There is work going into giving the LLMs access to external data & systems. This is my basis for saying they will be able to stay up to date. I have a very different approach I'm working on: https://docs.hofstadter.io/getting-started/creators https://docs.hofstadter.io/getting-started/creators (human-made blueprints that can be started from and later updated to bring in the upstream changes)

JohnMakin 3y ago

but how will it be maintained? "IAC" seems like a bit of a misnomer here, if I'm understanding correctly. Now, if Pulumi generated terraform for me to maintain, that'd be a different matter, but this article seems to just produce cloud resources based on LLM prompts, which are not deterministic at all.

twalla 3y ago
It produces pulumi programs which are the equivalent of a terraform module or main.tf file. Whether or not said programs are deterministic is another matter.
dmattia 3y ago
Pulumi is an IAC tool similar to Terraform (it actually usually calls terraform providers over gRPC under the hood), just written in languages like Typescript/Python. I think the intention would be to use this AI prompt thing to generate pulumi and then to insert it into your codebase, just like you'd do with terraform, and then it becomes deterministic. I've used ChatGPT and other tools to generate Pulumi before, so I'm not totally sure how this specific tool from Pulumi is different, but I'd guess they've somehow trained it more specifically on their sdks/docs or something
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  thanks for the clarification

shadycuz 3y ago

Yeah but ChatGPT can already write Terraform and Cloudformation really well. So this doesn't seem that special besides it's already baked into the pulumi eco system.

gtirloni 3y ago

> exactly to spec And that spec is?

fdgsdfogijq 3y ago
Natural language :)
- diarrhea 3y ago
  Reminds me of UML. Instead of laboriously hand-writing all this nasty code, why not use a tool that can autogenerate it for us? After all, all that’s needed is a spec (UML)! Of course, the spec is the work. LLMs are then just very potent at translating it to be machine-readable.