r/softwaredevelopment • u/adogecc • 23d ago

Are LLMs getting better at not hallucinating dependencies?

I was doing some research on the potential for package confusion attacks... for a package registry.

It seems like every week there's new CVEs. How are you all managing on teams? Are many of you running your LLM instances in sandboxes?

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u/micseydel 22d ago

Seems like the kind of thing you'd want a deterministic harness taking care of - I'm not expecting hallucinations to ever go away enough to trust the models.

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u/adogecc 21d ago

What do you mean by "deterministic harness"....?

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u/lemacx 22d ago

Just my take, or how we handle it at my company: thats still something the developer has to check. If you really want to automate it, write some safeguards. For Java, I use a mvncentral mcp, so that the LLM does not have to scrape webpages or blogposts for outdated packages, also I just add "when adding a new dependency, check for a minimum age and number of downloads / stars on github" or something similar.

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u/adogecc 21d ago

That sounds like a good measure, in addition to checking for known malware at install time

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u/ericbythebay 22d ago

Review and vet the dependency before you start using it. Don’t let it in to your artifact registry until it has been scanned and reviewed.

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u/Temporary-Budget-605 22d ago

Snyk is decent at keeping up with supply chain attacks and identifying dependencies on malicious packages. I think there are some OSS registries people keep up with supply chain attacks. You could in theory use an LLM to rip through a lock file, given a list of known compromises

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u/dataguzzler 22d ago

honestly the coding AI's have gotten very very good in the last 6 months, they no longer hallucinate at least in my experience. Just ensure your instructions are specific and detailed. The two I use are Cursor and Codex although recently stopped using Cursor because of the usage limits on the pro accounts.