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.

2) In regards to having good backup hygiene, who is we?

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.

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.

I suppose that LLMs will be treated as a code artifact and liability will shift upstream towards who deployed/approved the access in the first place. Even though code is essentially deterministic, making that association fairly simple, it's going to boil down to this same paradigm.

Perhaps governance rules will evolve to even explicitly forbid it, but my gut feeling is that for what the future determines to be "practical" reasons (right or wrong) LLMs will warrant an entirely new set of rules to allow them to be in the chain at all.

+ EDIT: both my wife and I have experience in this area and the current answer is companies like KPMG don't have an answer yet. Existing rules do help (e.g. there better be good documented reasons why it was used and that access was appropriately scoped, etc), but there is enough ambiguity around these tools so they say "stay tuned, and take caution".