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Comment by cocoto | Hacker News Reader

If there is no error on the compiler implementation and no undefined behavior the resulting program is equivalent and the few differences are mostly just implementation defined stuff which are left to the compiler to decide (but often gcc and clang do the same). The performance might differ also. It’s clearly not comparable to the many differences you can get from LLM’s output.

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It just depends what level of abstraction you're willing to pretend doesn't matter.

gcc and clang produce different assembly code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing."

Claude and Gemini produce different Rust code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing."

The issue is that the ultimate beneficiary of AI is the business owner. He's not a programmer, and he has a much looser definition of "same."

No, the ultimate beneficiary of LLM-created code is the toll collectors who stole as much intellectual property as they could (and continue to do so), fleecing everyone else that they are Promethean for having done so and for continuing to do so.

It has to stop somewhere. Business owner can also hire a different company to create the product and get a result different by as little as 5% performance difference or something with clearly inferior maintainability and UX. You'd hardly argue that it's 'the same' when they followed the same spec, which will never be fully precise at the business level. I agree that talking to an LLM is akin to using the business oriented logic at the module or even function level.

Your logic sounds like willful ignorance. You are relying on some odd definitions of "definitions", "equivalence", and "procedures". These are all rigorously defined in the underlying theory of computer science (using formal logic, lambda calculus, etc.)

Claude and Gemini do not "do the same thing" in the same way in which Clang and GCC does the same thing with the same code (as long as certain axioms of the code holds).

The C Standard has been rigorously written to uphold certain principles such that the same code (following its axioms) will always produce the same results (under specified conditions) for any standard compliant compiler. There exists no such standard (and no axioms nor conditions to speak of) where the same is true of Claude and Gemini.

If you are interested, you can read the standard here (after purchasing access): https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:9899:ed-5:v1:en

> Claude and Gemini do not "do the same thing" in the same way in which Clang and GCC does the same thing with the same code (as long as certain axioms of the code holds).

True, but none of that is relevant to the non-programmer end user.

> You are relying on some odd definitions of "definitions", "equivalence", and "procedures"

These terms have rigorous definitions for programmers. The person making software in the future is a non-programmer and doesn't care about any of that. They care only that the LLM can produce what they asked for.

> The C Standard has been rigorously written to uphold certain principles

I know what a standard is. The point is that the standard is irrelevant if you never look at the code.

It is indeed extremely relevant to the end user. For websites the end user is not the creator of the web site who pushes it to the server, it is the user who opens it on a browser. And for that user it matters a great deal if a button is green or blue, if it responds to keyboard events, if it says “submit” or “continue”, etc. It also matters to the user whether their information is sent to a third party, whether their password is leaked, etc.

Your argument here (if I understand you correctly) is the same argument that to build a bridge you do not need to know all the laws of physics that prevents it from collapsing. The project manager of the construction team doesn’t need to know it, and certainly not the bicyclists who cross it. But the engineer who draws the blueprints needs to know it, and it matters that every detail on those blueprints are rigorously defined, such that the project manager of the construction team follows them to the letter. If the engineer does not know the laws of physics, or the project manager does not follow the blueprints to the letter, the bridge will likely collapse, killing the end user, that poor bicyclist.

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