this is the way LLMs _should_ be used, as an assistant to create reliable, deterministic code. and honestly, they're fantastic when used this way. build the thing you need with the LLM, then put the LLM away.

but in practice, the current obsession with agents means people are creating applications that depend entirely on sending requests to LLMs for their core functionality. which means abandoning the whole idea of deterministic software in favor of just praying that all of the prompts you put around those API requests will lead to the right result.