Comment by potatolicious

> "because LLMs are not part of the probabilistic environment of the domain you're engineering; rather, you're injecting new probabilistic inputs into your system"

You do this as a process engineer also. You don't have to have a human operator inserting the stator into the motor housing, you could have a robot do it (it would cost a lot more) and be a lot more deterministic.

After the stator is in the housing you don't need to have a human operator close it using a hand tool. You could do it robotically in which case the odds of failure are much lower. That also costs a lot.

You choose to insert probabilistic components into the system because you've evaluated the tradeoffs around it and decided it's worth it.

Likewise you could do sentiment analysis of a restaurant review in a non-probabilistic manner - there are many options! But you choose a probabilistic ML model because it does a better job overall and you've evaluated the failure modes.

These things really aren't that different.