Comment by w4yai
7 hours ago
> Whatever your design document/spec, there are generally a lot of ways and variations of how to implement it, and programmers like the OP do care about those.
You could make the same argument about compilers : whatever is the code you wrote, your compiler may produce assembly instructions in an undeterministic way.
Of course, there are many ways to write the same thing, but the end performance is usually the same (assuming you know what you are doing).
If your spec is strong enough to hold between different variations, you shouldn't need to worry about the small details.
> You could make the same argument about compilers : whatever is the code you wrote, your compiler may produce assembly instructions in an undeterministic way.
The difference is that the compiler is bound by formal (or quasi-formal) language semantics. In terms of language semantics, you always get precisely the same result, regardless of how the compiler implements it. When you change the source code, you can reason and predict with precision about how this will change the behavior of your compiled program. You can’t do that reasoning with AI prompts, they don’t have that level of predictability.
> You could make the same argument about compilers : whatever is the code you wrote, your compiler may produce assembly instructions in an undeterministic way.
Bit of a stretch, I think, because the compiler guarantees it will follow the language spec. The LLM will be influenced by your spec but there are no guarantees.