Indeed - one year ago we floated the idea it is better to write your code if you can, than get third parties. But it was a heresy at the time to consider LLMm filling the gaps.
Today I’m limiting the exposure to dependencies more than ever, and particularly for things that take few hundred lines to implement. It’s a paradigm shift, no less.
This replaces supply chain trust with the trust in the LLM and the provider you're using. Even if you exclude model devs from your threat model and are running the LLM yourself, it's still an uninterpretable black box that is trained on the web data which can be and is manipulated precisely to attack LLMs during training. So this approach still needs proper supply chain security.
Well it needs, and in particular if you use an adversarial model tuned to inject malware. Not sure if it was researched though to this degree and no provider would tell you anyways I guess :)
There are a lot of libs you really can't justify implementing from scratch. Mathjs and node-mysql jump to mind. Poisoned chains build up from small dependencies, and clearly staying on top of your dependency chain should be a full time job - if anyone was willing to pay someone to do that full time.
Of course, and thank God for them. But many more look more complicated and serve more use case than you typically actually need. Like - how much of ffmpeg you need, well depends on the project. And perhaps someone is happily tearing it down with LLM to get precisely these parts (not me, though I enjoy doing it to LLMs and other models).
But being able to have agents implement pelr5 in rust and make it faster and more secure raises many questions towards the role of open source and consequences of security and supply chain risks.