alt Hacker NewsIt's a bit insane how it seems that "deterministic and reproducible", what I would consider to be a cornerstone of good software development, has apparently become an afterthought in the age of LLMs. All that for the sake of perceived convenience.
Not even convenience at times, I think that for some the amount of technical-sounding text LLMs can output on demand is comforting. It feels serious. It feels like it's doing something important.
Meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with these low-signal/high-noise walls of text in commit messages and PR comments. Or ask another LLM to summarize them, I suppose. "Doing and undoing, it's all work", as we say in French.
Devil's advocating here... is human code deterministic and reproducible? If I am assigned some non-trivial task, and write it twice with a week in-between, the code is not going to be identical, though it will meet the requirements. Or, if you give 3 different senior devs the same task on the same day, they will all be different, but still meet the requirements. What is different about asking an LLM to write code?