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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

(martinfowler.com)
416 points floverfelt | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 18:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.585s | source
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ares623 ◴[28 Aug 25 19:56 UTC] No.45056350[source]▶
> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world.

> Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.

Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering.

Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!

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AaronAPU ◴[28 Aug 25 20:40 UTC] No.45056797[source]▶
It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics.

Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?

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1. Viliam1234 ◴[28 Aug 25 21:22 UTC] No.45057186[source]▶
Two words: many-world interpretation.

More seriously, this is not a fair comparison. Adding LLM output to your source code is not analogical to quantum physics; it is analogical to letting your 5 years old child transcribe the experimentally measured values without checking and accepting that many of them will be transcribed wrong.

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2. AaronAPU ◴[30 Aug 25 20:54 UTC] No.45077918[source]▶
The point is that determinism is an emergent phenomena and when you dig deeper it reduces to a ground which is nowhere near as stable. So as a heuristic, moving away from deterministic models isn’t necessarily the wrong direction.

Many worlds is, like you just said, an interpretation, and interestingly only one of many!