Comment by saltcured

This argument is conflating determinism as in "byte-for-byte reproducible builds" with determinism as in "builds are semantically correct".

The fact that a traditional PL compiler output can have different performance, based on stochastic optimizations, is not in dispute. But, we consider the compiler flawed and inappropriate for use when it will randomly produce incorrect machine code. Under normal circumstances, we can infer that "correct" source code will produce "correct" builds every time it is fed through a valid compiler.

The problem people have with slop and vibe coding is that there is no formal semantics to even define correctness of the LLM/agent output.

With no formal semantics to constrain the outputs, you have to treat each prompt/inference run as a fuzzy search. What it "finds" may or may not match your intended semantics. It is merely a candidate that might correspond to your ambiguously specified semantic intent.

It is magical and lazy thinking that leads people to use this fuzzy search process in "I'm feeling lucky" mode.