It is not obvious to me that determinism is a requirement for an abstraction

IMO delegation isn't abstraction.

I work at a certain level, like Ruby code. That's what I write, debug and maintain. I don't really care about the internals of the interpreter or about the source code of Linux, because these layers are taken care of, they're reliable and they're being developed by competent people. I [think I] know what Ruby code should look like in order to remain [reasonably] fast, maintainable and reliable, and it's my job to build a product out of that kind of code. If I keep writing code like that, I know for sure that I'll be able to keep building the product, because the layers underneath are deterministic. It's like the certificate chain of trust, but with "surely these people are not idiots". And that's simply not the case with LLMs.

Not only can the LLM be a massive idiot, but also an unpredictable one. I can try to warn it, steer it, police it or review as much as you ask me to, but ultimately you're asking me to delegate my job and my responsibilities to an intermediate whose reasoning I don't understand, who has no loyalty, no sense of pride, no sense of ethics, can't be taught and can't be fired.

> It is not obvious to me that determinism is a requirement for an abstraction

But it is a requirement for them to be an "abstraction just like" assemblers or compilers, which is what was being claimed.