> 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!
For example, web requests are non-deterministic. They depend, among other things, on the state of the network. They also depend on the load of the machine serving the request.
One way to think about this is: how easy is it for you to produce byte-for-byte deterministic builds of the software you're working on? If it's not trivial there's more non-determinism than is obvious.
It is definitely non-trivial and large organizations spend money to try to make it happen.
It’s non trivial because you have to back through decades of tools and fix all of them to remove non determinism because they weren’t designed with that in mind.
The hardest part was ensuring build environment uniformity but that’s a lot easier with docker and similar tooling.