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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

What sort of safeguards do you have to prevent the LLM from emitting sql queries that edit the data?

So the way that we enforce it, is that we only generate SELECT queries, and do a post process verification to make sure that the result is actually only a read-only query.

I think you have a great point though, this should be made much clearer so users can build trust in using the product. Thanks a lot for the feedback!

What safeguards prevent the LLM from generating Cartesian products?

> So the way that we enforce it, is that we only generate SELECT queries, and do a post process verification to make sure that the result is actually only a read-only query.

So it will select from functions?

  CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION delete_all_from_table(_tbl regclass)
  RETURNS integer AS
  $func$
  DECLARE
    _r record;
    _count integer = 0;
  BEGIN
    FOR _r IN 
        EXECUTE format('DELETE FROM %s RETURNING *', _tbl)
    LOOP
        _count := _count + 1;
    END LOOP;

    RETURN _count;
  END
  $func$  LANGUAGE plpgsql;

SELECT delete_all_from_table('users');

Isnt that as easy as giving a non-write user to the app?

This is another way to make sure that the app doesn't overstep it's permissions,

It's still very valid feedback, on our side we should make the permissions of each user very clear and make it clearer that we only do select queries. Will make sure to make those changes! Thanks for the feedback!

This reply gives me a bit of anxiety. Solving this should have been one of the most important things regarding something like this

Obviously, generating queries from natural language should be the most important thing

And providing the user interface to do that

I think I would be okay with not having the ability to generate queries from natural language if it came with the possibility of my data randomly getting clobbered!

Surely you wouldn't give a third party analytics app write access to your prod DB? It would be a nice UX improvement if the app checked the permissions and gave you instructions on how to set the permissions properly, but this seems to be entirely at the level of setting it up correctly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com