I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.

I agree with you. It’s actually similar to the frustration of using ill-documented, ill-behaved libraries or tools that are either closed-source or otherwise inscrutable. They may even be deterministic, but what’s frustrating is when you can’t reason about their behavior, can’t predict what will happen when you change x to y, and instead only can hope that it won’t screw up.