alt Hacker News> This comes up now as “is vibecoding sane if LLMs are nondeterministic?” Again: do you want the CS answer, or the engineering answer?
Determinism would help you. With a bit of engineering, you could make LLMs deterministic: basically, fix the random seed for the PRNG and make sure none of the other sources of entropy mentioned earlier in the article contribute.
But that barely impact any of the issues people bring up with LLMs.
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And determinism isn’t particularly helpful with compilers. We expect adherence to some sort of spec. A compiler that emits radically different code depending on how much whitespace you put between tokens could still be completely deterministic, but it’s not the kind of tool we want to be using.
Determinism is a red herring. What matters is how rigorous the relationship is between the input and the output. Compilers can be used in automated pipelines because that relationship is rigorous.
If you've got a fixed GPU that doesn't degrade at all during the process, I think? If you switch GPUs (even another one of the same model) or run it long enough the feed-forward of rounding will produce different results, right?