> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.

Talk about a nonsensical non-sequitur, but I’ll bite. People want those to be deterministic too, to a large extent.

When people cook a meal with the same ingredients and the same times and processes (like parameters to a function), they expect it to taste about the same, they never expect to cook a pizza and take a salad out of the oven.

When they have sex, people expect to ejaculate and feel good, not have their intercourse morph into a drag race with a clown half-way though.

And when they want a “solution”, they want it to be reliable and trustworthy, not have it shit the bed unpredictably.

> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions.

Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.

> 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..

Are you suggesting that an average user would want to precisely describe in detail what they want, every single time, instead of clicking on a link that gives them what they want?

The issue with not having something deterministic is that when there's regression, you cannot surgically fix the regression. Because you can't know how "Plan A" got morphed into "Modules B, C, D, E, F, G," and so on.

And don't even try to claim there won't ever be any regression: Current LLM-based A.I. will 'happily' lie to you that they passed all tests -- because based on interactions in the past, it has.

When I reach for a hammer I want it to behave like a hammer every time. I don't ever want the head to fly off the handle or for it to do other things. Sometimes I might wish the hammer were slightly different, but most of the time I would want it to be exactly like the hammer I have.

Websites are tools. Tools being non-deterministic can be a really big problem.

Companies want determinism. And for most things, people want predictability. We've spent a century turning people into robots for customer support, assembly lines, etc. Very few parts of everyday life that still boil down to "make a deal with the person you're talking to."

So even if it would be better to have more flexibility, most business won't want it.

So basically you say the future of web would be everyone gets their own Jarvis, and like Tony you just tell Jarvis what you want and it does it for you, theres no need for a preexisting software or to even write a new one, it just does what's needed to fulfill the given request and give you the results you want. This sounds nice but wouldn't it get repetitive and computationally expensive, life imagine instead of Google maps, everyone just asks the AI directly for the things people typically use Google maps for like directions and location reviews etc. A centralized application like maps can be more efficient as it's optimized for commonly needed work and it can be further improved from all the data gathered from users who interact with this app, on the other hand if AI was allowed to do it's own thing, it could keep reinventing the wheel solving the same tasks again and again without the benefit of building on top of prior work, while not getting the improvements that it would get from the network effect of a large number of users interacting with the same app.

We're used to dealing with human failure modes, AI fails in so unfamiliar ways it's hard to deal with.

But it is still very early days. And if you have the AI generate code for deterministic things and fast execution, but the ai always monitors the code and if the user requires things that don't fit code, it will jump in. It's not one or the other necessarily.

Determinism is the edge these systems have. Granted in theory enough AI power could be just as good. Like 1,000,000 humans could give you the answer of a postgres query. But the postgres gonna be more efficient.