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Comment by DougN7 | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re assuming your reference is the correct one. I can’t reason about the assembly language that the compiler spits out, the microcode in the CPU kernel or any of the electronics on the motherboard. That anyone can or not doesn’t change things in my opinion. It’s an arbitrary distinction to say _this_ abstraction is uniquely different in this very specific way.

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Compilers are deterministic.

LLMs are not.

>Compilers are deterministic

They seem that way, until you're tasked with getting a repeatable, idempotent build out of a non-trivial build system.

LLMs are deterministic if you force a seed or disable sampling. They however do not guarantee that small input changes will cause small output changes.

> LLMs are deterministic if you force a seed or disable sampling

Not with todays GPU's, you would need to run it locally with special GPU settings or run it on your CPU to ensure it is deterministic.

So? Compilers compile and LLMs do not. Compilers use linkers and LLMs do not. Arbitrary distinctions don’t means “this time it’s different”.

So as the OP said, all the parts are deterministic in this stack. Their behavior is fixed for a given input, and all the parts are interpretable, readable, verifiable and observable.

This is entirely different from LLMs which are opaque even to their designers, and have unpredictable flaws and hallucinations, they are probability machines based on what data they have been exposed to, which means they are not a reliable way to generate programs.

Maybe one day we'll fix this, but the current generation is not very useful for programming because of this.

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