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Comment by tptacek

2 days ago

Nobody has claimed to be getting deterministic outputs from LLMs.

> My prompts specify very precisely what should be implemented. I specified the public API and high-level design upfront. I let the AI come up with its own storage schema initially but then I prompted it very specifically through several improvements (e.g. "denormalize this table into this other table to eliminate a lookup"). I designed the end-to-end encryption scheme and told it in detail how to implement it. I pointed out bugs and explained how to fix them. And so on.

OK. Replace "[expected] deterministic output" with whatever term best fits what this block of text is describing, as that's what I'm talking about. The claim is that a sufficiently-precisely-specified prompt can produce reliably-correct code. Which is just clearly not the case, as of today.

  • I don't even think anybody expects reliably-correct code. They expect code that can be made as reliably as they themselves could make code, with some minimal amount of effort. Which clearly is the case.

    • Forget about reliably-correct. The code that any current-gen LLM generates, no matter how precise the prompt it's given, is never even close to the quality standards expected of any senior-level engineer, in any organization I've been a part of, at any point in my career. They very much never produce code that is as good as what I can create. If the LLM-generated code you're seeing passes this level of muster, in your view, then that's really a reflection on your situation(s), and 100% not any kind of truth that you can claim as part of a blog post or whatever...

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