alt Hacker NewsThe whole field of reproducible builds is only a field because compilers also have had trouble historically of producing binary artifacts with guaranteed provenance and binary compatibility even when built from the same source codes.
If I assign a bug fix ticket to a human developer on my team, I won't be able to precisely replicate how they go about solving the bug but for many bugs I can at least be assured that the bug will get solved, and that I understand the basic approach the assigned dev would use to troubleshoot and resolve the ticket.
This is an organizational abstraction but it's an abstraction just the same, leaky as it is.
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It's an abstraction for you, not the rest of that developer's team, who have to reproduce the same solution even after said developer has "won the lottery", so-to-speak.
inb4: "Don't worry, just use GPT to make the docs"
> The whole field of reproducible builds is only a field because compilers also have had trouble
No, this is not comparable. The reason reproducible builds are tricky is not because compilers are inherently prone to randomness, it's because binaries often bake-in things like timestamps and the exact pathnames of the system used to produce the build. People need to stop comparing LLMs to compilers, it's an embarrassingly poor analogy.