[alpaylan]

I think the point I wanted to make was that even if it was deterministic (which you can technically make it to be I guess?) you still shouldn’t live in a world where you’re guided by the “guesses” that the model makes when solidifying your intent into concrete code. Discounting hallucinations (I know this a is a big preconception, I’m trying to make the argument from a disadvantaged point again), I think you need a stronger argument than determinism in the discussion against someone who claims they can write in English, no reason for code anymore; which is what I tried to make here. I get your point that I might be taking the discussion to seriously though.

[liveoneggs]

The future is about embracing absolute chaos. The great reveal of LLMs is that, for the most part, nothing actually mattered except the most shallow approximation of a thing.

[belZaah]

This is true only for a small subset of problems. If you write crypto or hardware drivers, details do matter.

[wizzwizz4]

The great reveal of LLMs is that our systems of checks and balances don't really work, and allow grifters to thrive, but despite that most people were actually trying to do their jobs properly. Perhaps nothing matters to you except the most shallow approximation of a thing, but there are usually people harmed by such negligence.

[ModernMech]

I think the exact opposite is true: LLMs revealed that when you average everything together, it's really bland and uninteresting no matter how technically good. It's the small choices that bring life into a thing and transform it from slop into something interesting and worthy of attention.

[raw_anon_1111]

Before LLMs and now more than a decade ago in my career, I was assigned a task and my job was to translate that task into a working implementation. I was guided by the “guesses” that other developers made. I had to trust that they could do FizzBuzz competently without having to tell them to use the mod operator

Then my job became I am assigned a larger implementation and depending on how large the implementation was, I had to design specifications for others to do some or all of the work and validate the final product for correctness. I definitely didn’t pore over every line of code - especially not for front end work that I stopped doing around the same time.

The same is true for LLMs. I treat them like junior developers and slowly starting to treat them like halfway competent mid level ticket takers.

[blazinglyfast]

> even if it was deterministic (which you can technically make it to be I guess?)

No. LLMs are undefined behavior.

[xixixao]

OP means “given the same input, produce the same output” determinism. This isn’t really much different from normal compilers, you might have a language spec, but at the end of the day the results are determined by the concrete compiler’s implementation.

But most LLM services on purpose introduce randomness, so you don’t get the same result for the same input you control as a user.

[seanmcdirmid]

Determinism excludes guessing and any kind of non-algorithmic decision making.