alt Hacker NewsThe question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?"
Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?
Replies
No, I wouldn’t say that my hypothesis is that non-deterministic behavior is good. It’s an undesirable side effect and illustrates the gap we have between now and the coming post-code world.
Every time you need a rarely used functionality it might be better to wait 60s for an LLM with MCP tools to do its work than to update an app. It only makes sense to optimize and maintain app functionalities when they are reused.
I think it's actually conceptually pretty different. LLMs today are usually constrained to:
1. Outputting text (or, sometimes, images).
2. No long term storage except, rarely, closed-source "memory" implementations that just paste stuff into context without much user or LLM control.
This is a really neat glimpse of a future where LLMs can have much richer output and storage. I don't think this is interesting because you can recreate existing apps without coding... But I think it's really interesting as a view of a future with much richer, app-like responses from LLMs, and richer interactions — e.g. rather than needing to format everything as a question, the LLM could generate links that you click on to drill into more information on a subject, which end up querying the LLM itself! And similarly it can ad-hoc manage databases for memory+storage, etc etc.
For some things you absolutely want deterministic behaviour. For other things, behaviour that adapts to usage and the context provided by the data the user provides sounds like it could potentially be very exciting. I'm glade people are exploring this. The hard part will be figuring out where the line goes, and when and how to "freeze" certain behaviours that the user seems happy with vs. continuing to adapt to data.
Web apps kind of already do that with most companies shipping constant UX redesigns, A/B tests, new features, etc.
For a typical user today’s software isn’t particularly deterministic. Auto updates mean your software is constantly changing under you.
Like, for sure you can ask the AI to save it's "settings" or "context" to a local file in a format of its own choosing, and then bring that back in the next prompt ; couple this with temperature 0 and you should get to a fixed-point deterministic app immediately
Llms are easily made deterministic by choosing the selection strategy. More than being deterministic they are also fully analayzable and you don't run into issues like the halting problem if you constrain the output appropriately.
Designing a system with deterministic behavior would require the developer to think. Human-Computer Interaction experts agree that a better policy is to "Don't Make Me Think" [1]
> who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?
Technically everyone, we stopped using static pages a while ago.
Imagine pages that can now show you e.g. infinitely customizable UI; or, more likely, extremely personalized ads.
Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.
You or your coworker are not a web app. You can do some of the things that web apps can, and many things that a web app can't, but neither is because of the modality.
Coded determinism is hard for many problems and I find it entirely plausible that it could turn out to be the wrong approach in software, that is designed to solve some level of complex problems more generally. Average humans are pretty great at solving a certain class of complex problems that we tried to tackle unsuccessfully with many millions lines of deterministic code, or simply have not had a handle on at all, like (like build a great software CEO).