"A compiler is free to optimize...", on sufficiently basic prompting "make me a user address collection form that writes to a database table called 'registered_users'..."

...I agree it's not deterministic (neither are all your variations of C compilers, neither is Firefox v Safari v Chrome), but it probably Does Something(tm), and I might not want to peel back the covers and see how it used React, or Vue, VanillaJS, QT, or GTK.

It's upsetting that we are _committing the generated code_ rather than being able to use better and better optimizing compilers against the original prompt of: "make me a user registration form with database connection"

...I'm very with you on "it's not an accurate analogy", but I'm pointing out that there have been sea-changes already w.r.t. strict adherence to the generated code, or inclusion of left-pad v react libraries.

...and there have been corresponding productivity gains (debatable? ;-) when we've worked at these higher levels of abstraction.

I'm personally still in the "blacksmith" stage of working with AI output (put it back in the fire and beat on it a bunch more times), and shudder in horror at the thought of maintaining (or paying to maintain) megabytes of hours of token generation that looks like source code.

I'm hopeful that we'll eventually strip out some of the mud between the CPU and putting pixels on the screen (with the help of LLM's?), and that we'll still be able to understand and reason about the real "DAG" of what our programs are trying to do (eg: declarative guis, kindof like we have declarative sql), but there will always be a muddy middle part where the computer/complier/LLM is doing something in between that _is_ sufficiently reliable for us to ignore those bits most of the time.