[ahmadyan]

Very few people have the expertise to write efficient assembly code, yet everyone relies on compilers and assemblers to translate high-level code to byte-level machine code. I think same concept is true here.

Once coding agents become trivial, few people will know the detail of the programming language and make sure intent is correctly transformed to code, and the majority will focus on different objectives and take LLM programming for granted.

[feanaro]

No, that's a completely different concept, because we have faultless machines which perfectly and deterministically translate high-level code into byte-level machine code. This is another case of (nearly) perfect abstraction.

On the other hand, the whole deal of the LLM is that it does so stochastically and unpredictably.

[Cthulhu_]

The unpredictable part isn't new - from a project manager's point of view, what's the difference between an LLM and a team of software engineers? Both, from that POV, are a black box. The "how" is not important to them, the details aren't important. What's important is that what they want is made a reality, and that customers can press on a button to add a product to their shopping cart (for example).

LLMs mean software developers let go of some control of how something is built, which makes one feel uneasy because a lot of the appeal of software development is control and predictability. But this is the same process that people go through as they go from coder to lead developer or architect or project manager - letting go of control. Some thrive in their new position, having a higher overview of the job, while some really can't handle it.

[endymion-light]

As someone that started off with assembly issues for a large corporation - assembly code may sometimes contain very similiar issues that mroe high-level code those, the perfection of the abstraction is not guaranteed.

But yeah, there's currently a wide gap between that and a stochastic LLM.

[theshrike79]

We also have machines that can perfectly and deterministically check written code for correctness.

And the stohastic LLM can use those tools to check whether its work was sufficient, if not, it will try again - without human intervention. It will repeat this loop until the deterministic checks pass.

[lelanthran]

> Very few people have the expertise to write efficient assembly code, yet everyone relies on compilers and assemblers to translate high-level code to byte-level machine code. I think same concept is true here.

That's a poor analogy which gets repeated in every discussion: compilers are deterministic, LLMs are not.

[mpyne]

> That's a poor analogy which gets repeated in every discussion: compilers are deterministic, LLMs are not.

Compilers are not used directly, they are used by human software developers who are also not deterministic.

From the perspective of an organization with a business or service-based mission, they already know how to supervise non-deterministic LLMs because they already know how to supervise non-deterministic human developers.

[haspok]

Why does it matter if LLMs are not deterministic? Who cares?

There should be tests covering meaningful functionality, as long as the code passes the tests, ie. the externally observable behaviour is the same, I don't care. (Especially, if many tests can also be autogenerated with the LLM.)

[Marazan]

Yes, but compilers (in the main), do not have a random number generator to decide what output to produce.

[discreteevent]

The difference is that if you write in C you can debug in C. You don't have to debug the assembly. You can write an english wish list for an LLM but you will still have to debug the generated code. To debug it you will need to understand it.

[haspok]

Why would you have to debug generated code? Let the LLM debug it.