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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

by cowlby 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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.
- 3form 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  This comment is savage and I’m here for it.
- cowlby 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
1) Can you explain what demand and supply mean in this context? 2) In regards to having good backup hygiene, who is we?
- cowlby 6mo ago
  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...
gmueckl 6mo ago
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.
throw5 6mo ago
> 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.
- steve_adams_86 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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.
raincole 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  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.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
argomo 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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.

by cowlby 6mo ago

antonvs 6mo ago

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.

3form 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
This comment is savage and I’m here for it.
cowlby 6mo ago
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 6mo ago

1) Can you explain what demand and supply mean in this context? 2) In regards to having good backup hygiene, who is we?

cowlby 6mo ago
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...

gmueckl 6mo ago

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.

throw5 6mo ago

> 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.

steve_adams_86 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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.

raincole 6mo ago

> 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 6mo ago
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.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

argomo 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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.