Comment by devnonymous
2 days ago
> We simply have better magic wands and more powerful spells now.
Wouldn't it be nice though if the incantation of the same spell would always do the same thing every time ? You see that's how my old wand and spells worked.
Look at it from the perspective of a manager above individual developers. Their instructions to those devs are already a series of non-deterministic incantations. They ask for things in English and get something back in Git a week later!
We've just pushed that indirection down a level from managers to ICs.
The ICs are shocked and surprised that this level of imprecision is allowed.
Their managers are not shocked at all, this is normal for them!
The managers, aren’t on the hook for actually understanding and delivering the work, or fixing the system a week later when the vagaries of their wand-waving request come home to roost though.
They’re typically on the hook for making sure those tasks are accomplished, however. I’ve spent 30 years in this industry doing my best to avoid that role, because that’s a terrible place to be.
You're applying the doorman fallacy here. This has been discussed a lot. Honestly, the sooner the industry accepts that we aren't there yet nor does the current architecture enable us do get there, the sooner we can make progress towards that ideal state.
One day it will.
Not with LLMs, it won't. (The probabilistic prediction property prevents proper persistent programmable predictability)
It already can to a fairly large degree by setting the temperature to 0, fixing the seed and tweaking other deterministic settings. Removes all that probability and gives you something pretty boring, at least from a semantic perspective.