I'm not sure why people struggle with the fact that an abstraction can be built on top of a non-deterministic and stochastic system. Many such abstractions already exist in the world we live.

Take sending a packet over a noisy, low SNR cell network. A high number of packets may be lost. This doesn't prevent me, as a software developer, from building an abstraction on top of a "mostly-reliable" TCP connection to deliver my website.

There are times when the service doesn't work, particularly when the packet loss rate is too high. I can still incorporate these failures into my mental model of the abstraction (e.g through TIMEOUTs, CONN_ERRs…).

Much of engineering and reliability history revolves around building mathematical models on top of an unpredictable world. We are far from solving this problem with LLMs, but this doesn't prevent me from thinking of LLMs as a new level of abstraction that can edit and transform code.

A transmission error has a strictly contained, predictable blast radius. If a packet drops, the system knows exactly how to handle it: it throws a timeout, drops a connection, or asks for a retry. The worst-case scenario is known.

A reasoning error has an infinite, unpredictable blast radius. When an LLM hallucinates, it doesn't fail safely but it writes perfectly compiling code that does the wrong thing. That "wrong thing" might just render a button incorrectly, or it might silently delete your production database, or open a security backdoor.

You can build reliable abstractions over failures that are predictable and contained. You cannot abstract away unpredictable destruction.

I'm fine with that. The part that makes it not really an abstraction is, you still deliver code in the end. It'd be different if your deliverable were prompt+conversation, and the code were merely an intermediate build artifact. Usually people throw away the convo. Some have tried making markdown files the deliverable instead, so far that doesn't really work.

It makes even less sense when people compare an LLM to a compiler. Imagine making a pull request that's just adding a binary because you threw the source code away.

> I'm not sure why people struggle with the fact that an abstraction can be built on top of a non-deterministic and stochastic system. Many such abstractions already exist in the world we live.

It depends on what's the abstraction.

Using LLM for coding is 'abstracting' the developer, adding extra layer that can produce code. But it's not abstraction layer of the code itself.

Besides deeply unpredictable factors (like signal transmission), most users of higher-level abstractions do so without certainty about how the translation will be executed. For example, one of the main selling points of C when I was growing up was that you could write code independent of architecture, and leave the architecture-specific translation to assembly to the compiler!

Abstractions often embrace nondeterministic translation because lower level details are unknown at time of expression -- which is the moivation for many LLM queries.

If people can figure out how to write RFCs about IP over carrier pigeons for April Fools, they can figure out how to conceive of LLMs as a layer of abstraction beneath a protocol as well.

Grocery stores are a level of abstraction. Exchange money, get food. If your whole life you had grown food, it might feel a bit strange.

Occasionally the low level details leak through ie: this egg came from this farm, theres a shipping issue so onions are more expensive or whatever.

I think llm assisted coding is going to work something like this.

The kicker is when you delegate some work to another team member and discover that humans are also non-deterministic.

Machine itself is built on top of non deterministic world.

While your code is executing asteroid from space may hit it and halt execution.

People are really really weird about the non-determinism thing. Got someone very adamant that Prompt API shouldn't be a web standard because the output isn't deterministic and according to them that means we can't allow prompts.

Such strong correlation between narrow specific demands on how things have to be & posting, in general. I'd really like to see open mindedness & exploratory views be more frequent and have better standing, in general.

I do tend to think this is different than a level of abstraction. But it feels like it's trying to hit hard, on a pretty weird narrow point.

There’s a big difference between a packet being dropped and a packet’s meaning being changed along the way. The latter is better analogised to what LLMs do between receiving inputs and outputs.

that would make sense if ai said "fail. i dont know" . Its active deception is what makes it difficult.