alt Hacker NewsA programming language implementation produces results that are controllable, reproducible, and well-defined. An LLM has none of those properties, which makes the comparison moot.
Having an LLM make up underspecified details willy-nilly, or worse, ignore clear instructions is very different from programming languages "handling a lot of low-level stuff."
[citation needed]
You can set temperature to 0 in many LLMs and get deterministic results (on the same hardware, given floating-point shenanigans). You can provide a well-defined spec and test suite. You can constrain and control the output.