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129 points ericciarla | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.895s | source
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madrox ◴[] No.40712650[source]
I have a saying: "any sufficiently advanced agent is indistinguishable from a DSL"

If I'm really leaning into multi-tool use for anything resembling a mutation, then I'd like to see an execution plan first. In my experience, asking an AI to code up a script that calls some functions with the same signature as tools and then executing that script actually ends up being more accurate than asking it to internalize its algorithm. Plus, I can audit it before I run it. This is effectively the same as asking it to "think step by step."

I like the idea of Command R+ but multitool feels like barking up the wrong tree. Maybe my use cases are too myopic.

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TZubiri ◴[] No.40713743[source]
I think you are imagining a scenario where you are using the LLM manually. Tools are designed to serve as a backend for other GPT like products.

You don't have the capacity to "audit" stuff.

Furthermore tool execution occurs not in the LLM but in the code that calls the LLM through API. So whatever code executes the tool, it also orders the calling sequence graph. You don't need to audit it, you are calling it.

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verdverm ◴[] No.40713878[source]
People want to audit the args, mainly because of the potential for destructive operations like DELETE FROM and rm -rf /

How do you know a malicious actor won't try to do these things? How do you protect against it?

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viraptor ◴[] No.40713896[source]
Whitelisting and permissions. You can't issue a delete if anything not starting with SELECT is rejected. You can't have edge cases that work around that via functions, if the user the agent uses doesn't have permissions other than SELECT.
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verdverm ◴[] No.40714055[source]
"please get all the entries from the table foo and then remove them all"

SELECT * from foo; DELETE FROM foo ...

...because you know people will deploy a general SQL function or agent

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1. viraptor ◴[] No.40714088[source]
1. Lots of libraries prevent you from submitting multiple queries. It's a good idea to do that in general.

2. If only the second part of my message covered this...

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2. verdverm ◴[] No.40714168[source]
1 & 2. requires that you audit the agents and have uniform permissions, or additional plumbing to lookup user permissions and pass those along.

Have you looked at the agents prepackaged in popular frameworks? They aren't doing permission propagation or using additional libraries as guardrails.

What are most people going to do? This is why people are hesitant and ask about auditability

Considering 2 further, I only described deletion. A read-only database is of limited value. If you have write permissions, you could alternatively change values maliciously, even if you disable deletions. This might not be a malicious, and could be the result of an LLM error or hallucination.