3 ms·

> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world

> Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. > Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism. Those other forms of engineering have no choice due to the nature of what they are engineering. Software engineers already have a way to introduce determinism into the systems they build! We’re going backwards!

delusional 1y ago
I would rather say it like this: Very good, very hardworking engineers spent years of their lives building the machine that raised us from the non-determinism of messy physical reality. The technology that brought us perfect, replicable, and reliable math from sending electrons through rocks has been deeply underappreciated in the "software revolution". The engineers at TSMC, Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung, and others have done us an amazing service, and we are throwing all that hard work away.
sodapopcan 1y ago
As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having it write a script we can review and tweak is anti-progress." No one has said that outright, but it's a gut feeling (and it wouldn't surprise me if people have said this out loud).
- tptacek 1y ago
  This is the 2025 equivalent of the people who once wrote 2000 word blog posts about how bad it was to use "cat" instead of just shell redirection.
  - sodapopcan 1y ago
    These are hardly equivalent. One is someone preferring one deterministic way over another. The other is more akin to arguing that it's better to ask someone to manually complete a task for you instead of caching the instructions on your computer. Now if the LLM does caching then you have more of a point, I don't have enough experience there.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  I am one of these people. For my scripting needs, it would probably take me longer to find the script I saved rather than just asking it again and getting an answer in 15 seconds. I haven't saved a smallish script in a year.
  - achierius 1y ago
    I used to be one of those people, then I started saving these scripts in a folder and realized just how much time it saved me. Especially for nontrivial scripts which require a lot of typing or input specification.
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      This was me before LLMs. Had tons of scripts saved. I just don't see the point anymore "Take this list of users, remove from x group and reset their passwords" takes less time than trying to remember what I named that file and where it's saved. Anything that can be done in under 100 lines isn't worth saving anymore.
      - r_lee 1y ago
        Honestly, one of the biggest gains for me with LLMs has been bash scripting. its so great. especially if you have some saved in the same project and then you just tell it "look at the scripts in x and use that style"
      - sodapopcan 1y ago
        Usually one would save this type of thing as a build tool task.
didericis 1y ago
Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing. There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out. Yes, there have always been poorly documented black boxes, but I thought the goal was to minimize those. People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.
- pton_xd 1y ago
  Agreed. The beauty of programming is that you're creating a "mathematical artifact." You can always drill down and figure out exactly what is going on and what is going to happen with a given set of inputs. Now with things like concurrency that's not exactly true, but, I think the sentiment still holds. The more practical question is though, does that matter? Maybe not.
  - DSingularity 1y ago
    In a way this is also a mathematical artifact — after all tokens are selected through beam searching or some random sampling of likely successor tokens.
  - didericis 1y ago
    > The more practical question is though, does that matter? I think it matters quite a lot. Specifically for knowledge preservation and education.
    - bathtub365 1y ago
      Yep, LLM’s still run on hardware with the same fundamental architecture we’ve had for years, sitting under a standard operating system. The software is written in the same languages we’ve been using for a long time. Unless there’s some seismic shift where all of these layers go away we’ll be maintaining these systems for a while.
    - 1y ago
tptacek 1y ago
'potatolicious says we're going forwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  adding to this, software deals with non-determinism all the time. For example, web requests are non-deterministic. They depend, among other things, on the state of the network. They also depend on the load of the machine serving the request. One way to think about this is: how easy is it for you to produce byte-for-byte deterministic builds of the software you're working on? If it's not trivial there's more non-determinism than is obvious.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Mostly the engineering part of software is dealing with non-determinism, by avoiding it or enforcing determinism. Take something like TCP, it's all about guaranteeing the determinism that either the message is sent and received or it is not. And we have a lot of algorithms that tries to guarantee consistency of information between the elements of a system.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      Right, you handle determinism by applying engineering. E.g. having fail safes, redundancies, creating robust processes, etc.
    - ares623 1y ago
      But there is an underlying deterministic property in the TCP example. A message is either received within a timeout or not. How can that be extralopated with LLMs? How does a system independently know that it's arrived at a correct answer within a timeout or not? Has the halting problem been solved?
      - tptacek 1y ago
AaronAPU 1y ago
It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics. Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?
- Viliam1234 1y ago
  Two words: many-world interpretation. More seriously, this is not a fair comparison. Adding LLM output to your source code is not analogical to quantum physics; it is analogical to letting your 5 years old child transcribe the experimentally measured values without checking and accepting that many of them will be transcribed wrong.
  - AaronAPU 1y ago
    The point is that determinism is an emergent phenomena and when you dig deeper it reduces to a ground which is nowhere near as stable. So as a heuristic, moving away from deterministic models isn’t necessarily the wrong direction. Many worlds is, like you just said, an interpretation, and interestingly only one of many!
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Hopefully even Newton already had some awareness of "deterministic chaos" (or whatever terms they would have used back then) ? And on the side hand, no transistors without quantum mechanics.
positron26 1y ago
It's uncertainty, not non-determinism. I don't design a rocket with no idea about the chain of events. I have inscrutable uncertainty everywhere, from manufacture to flight.

delusional 1y ago

I would rather say it like this: Very good, very hardworking engineers spent years of their lives building the machine that raised us from the non-determinism of messy physical reality. The technology that brought us perfect, replicable, and reliable math from sending electrons through rocks has been deeply underappreciated in the "software revolution". The engineers at TSMC, Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung, and others have done us an amazing service, and we are throwing all that hard work away.

sodapopcan 1y ago

As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having it write a script we can review and tweak is anti-progress." No one has said that outright, but it's a gut feeling (and it wouldn't surprise me if people have said this out loud).

tptacek 1y ago
This is the 2025 equivalent of the people who once wrote 2000 word blog posts about how bad it was to use "cat" instead of just shell redirection.
- sodapopcan 1y ago
  These are hardly equivalent. One is someone preferring one deterministic way over another. The other is more akin to arguing that it's better to ask someone to manually complete a task for you instead of caching the instructions on your computer. Now if the LLM does caching then you have more of a point, I don't have enough experience there.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
bongodongobob 1y ago
I am one of these people. For my scripting needs, it would probably take me longer to find the script I saved rather than just asking it again and getting an answer in 15 seconds. I haven't saved a smallish script in a year.
- achierius 1y ago
  I used to be one of those people, then I started saving these scripts in a folder and realized just how much time it saved me. Especially for nontrivial scripts which require a lot of typing or input specification.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    This was me before LLMs. Had tons of scripts saved. I just don't see the point anymore "Take this list of users, remove from x group and reset their passwords" takes less time than trying to remember what I named that file and where it's saved. Anything that can be done in under 100 lines isn't worth saving anymore.
    - r_lee 1y ago
      Honestly, one of the biggest gains for me with LLMs has been bash scripting. its so great. especially if you have some saved in the same project and then you just tell it "look at the scripts in x and use that style"
    - sodapopcan 1y ago
      Usually one would save this type of thing as a build tool task.

didericis 1y ago

Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing. There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out. Yes, there have always been poorly documented black boxes, but I thought the goal was to minimize those. People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.

pton_xd 1y ago
Agreed. The beauty of programming is that you're creating a "mathematical artifact." You can always drill down and figure out exactly what is going on and what is going to happen with a given set of inputs. Now with things like concurrency that's not exactly true, but, I think the sentiment still holds. The more practical question is though, does that matter? Maybe not.
- DSingularity 1y ago
  In a way this is also a mathematical artifact — after all tokens are selected through beam searching or some random sampling of likely successor tokens.
- didericis 1y ago
  > The more practical question is though, does that matter? I think it matters quite a lot. Specifically for knowledge preservation and education.
  - bathtub365 1y ago
    Yep, LLM’s still run on hardware with the same fundamental architecture we’ve had for years, sitting under a standard operating system. The software is written in the same languages we’ve been using for a long time. Unless there’s some seismic shift where all of these layers go away we’ll be maintaining these systems for a while.
  - 1y ago

tptacek 1y ago

'potatolicious says we're going forwards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978319

ants_everywhere 1y ago
adding to this, software deals with non-determinism all the time. For example, web requests are non-deterministic. They depend, among other things, on the state of the network. They also depend on the load of the machine serving the request. One way to think about this is: how easy is it for you to produce byte-for-byte deterministic builds of the software you're working on? If it's not trivial there's more non-determinism than is obvious.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Mostly the engineering part of software is dealing with non-determinism, by avoiding it or enforcing determinism. Take something like TCP, it's all about guaranteeing the determinism that either the message is sent and received or it is not. And we have a lot of algorithms that tries to guarantee consistency of information between the elements of a system.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    Right, you handle determinism by applying engineering. E.g. having fail safes, redundancies, creating robust processes, etc.
  - ares623 1y ago
    But there is an underlying deterministic property in the TCP example. A message is either received within a timeout or not. How can that be extralopated with LLMs? How does a system independently know that it's arrived at a correct answer within a timeout or not? Has the halting problem been solved?
    - tptacek 1y ago

AaronAPU 1y ago

It was forward when Newton discovered the beautiful simple determinism of physics. Was it going backwards when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics emerged?

Viliam1234 1y ago
Two words: many-world interpretation. More seriously, this is not a fair comparison. Adding LLM output to your source code is not analogical to quantum physics; it is analogical to letting your 5 years old child transcribe the experimentally measured values without checking and accepting that many of them will be transcribed wrong.
- AaronAPU 1y ago
  The point is that determinism is an emergent phenomena and when you dig deeper it reduces to a ground which is nowhere near as stable. So as a heuristic, moving away from deterministic models isn’t necessarily the wrong direction. Many worlds is, like you just said, an interpretation, and interestingly only one of many!
BlueTemplar 1y ago
Hopefully even Newton already had some awareness of "deterministic chaos" (or whatever terms they would have used back then) ? And on the side hand, no transistors without quantum mechanics.

positron26 1y ago

It's uncertainty, not non-determinism. I don't design a rocket with no idea about the chain of events. I have inscrutable uncertainty everywhere, from manufacture to flight.