Thread

1. 2001zhaozhao · 1789596999 · focus · HN ↗

   Engineer: "HELP, our production DB is frozen on this query that worked fine before!"

   Infra: "Hmm, let's check... Well would you look at that, it seems like your LLM query planner usually works and produces fast queries, but this time when you changed a variable name to trigger query rebuild, it happened to hallucinate and miss an index, would you mind re-running the LLM a few times until you get a faster query?"

   1. malisper · 1789599271 · focus · HN ↗

      Funnily enough, you could replace "LLM query planner" with just "query planner" and this comment would still hold true

      1. Tanjreeve · 1789619599 · focus · HN ↗

         That bug is fixable and verifiable. The LLM you cross your fingers till the next time the same thing happens.

         1. egeozcan · 1789621811 · focus · HN ↗

            > fixable and verifiable

            By people with a specific skill set. LLMs generation can also be fixed and verified by people with a certain skill set, and non-deterministic computing doesn't automatically mean unpredictable. When people say that the LLMs are a black box, it means unpredictability in unknown situations.

            You do structured output, input validation, output validation, lower temperature, limit decisions, RL, etc. to increase predictability to near certainty. It's just statistics after all. Or you can as well generate the code to do the job.

            It's just that the required skill set is a different one to do those things, and unusual in the context of DB administration.

            1. Tanjreeve · 1789628351 · focus · HN ↗

               Only if someone is planning on running a pinned self hosted version of an LLM alongside the DB to fix the problem. The developer can change the binary easy enough and test it but the LLM approach just seems either theoretical or bending ourselves in knots to justify using an LLM.

               1. egeozcan · 1789628999 · focus · HN ↗

                  I didn't argue that it'd make sense, I just said that it could be reasonably fixable when problems occur and verifyable that the fix works. Even if shipping and RLing an LLM were easy tasks in terms of software distribution (they are not) we'd still hit the skill mismatch, as I said in my previous comment.

                  I just find the "all llms are non dererministic and therefore unreliable" narrative a bit backwards. All software that has more than 0 users needs to deal with non-determinism anyway :)

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