Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

> 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!

'potatolicious says we're going forwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319

That was an interesting take, but "probabilistic" is to me different from "random". In particular other field get error tolerances, LLMs give us nothing like that.

We're introducing chaos monkeys, not just variability.

Note that he's talking about the same nondeterminism in that post that we're talking about here.

From the linked comment

> Process engineers for example have to account for human error rates. [...] Designing systems to detect these errors (which are highly probabilistic!)

> Likewise even for regular mechanical engineers, there are probabilistic variances in manufacturing tolerances.

I read them as relatively confined, thus probabilistic. When a human pushes the wrong button, an elephant isn't raining from the sky. Same way tolerances are bounded.

When requesting a JSON array from an LLM, it could as well decide this time that JSON is a mythological Greek fighter.