Comment by soulofmischief
15 days ago
No, the key difference is that an engineer becomes more product-oriented, and the technicalities of the implementation are deprioritized.
It is a different paradigm, in the same way that a high-level language like JavaScript handles a lot of low-level stuff for me.
A programming language implementation produces results that are controllable, reproducible, and well-defined. An LLM has none of those properties, which makes the comparison moot.
Having an LLM make up underspecified details willy-nilly, or worse, ignore clear instructions is very different from programming languages "handling a lot of low-level stuff."
[citation needed]
You can set temperature to 0 in many LLMs and get deterministic results (on the same hardware, given floating-point shenanigans). You can provide a well-defined spec and test suite. You can constrain and control the output.
LLMs produce deterministic results? Now, that's a big [citation needed]. Where can I find the specs?
Edit: This is assuming by "deterministic," you mean the same thing I said about programming language implementations being "controllable, reproducible, and well-defined." If you mean it produces random but same results for the same inputs, then you haven't made any meaningful points.
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