yeah i get it too, i'm just flabbergasted that this is today's market

it reminds me of the pre-vulkan game programming days.. drivers were black boxes, game developpers had to resort to magic tricks to do stuff, until everybody got fed up and wanted some logical ground to operate

It's a brave new world, etc., isn't it?

One does find oneself slightly askance at one's own thinking sometimes, that's for sure.

But I suppose, is it really so different? I mean, back in the day moreso than now, a lot of the valuable IP in any system was in the design and specification of that system - the problems usually solved within the design and specificaion (use X algorithm, etc.) - and the code was "just" the implementation of those solutions.

So perhaps it's more of a regression in some ways: the value is in the specification (the prompt) once again.

Your point about stochastic behaviour is well made though, and there is no way to 100% guarantee or formally verify the behaviour of a system that relies on an underlying technology whose behaviour is fundamentally stochastic.

Further proof that this tech stack is immature and would have needed to bake for a more years.

In an ideal world this would have been public tech like ARPANET or WWW and there would have been 2-3 major iterations (until the equivalent of Claude 7-8) and only then would everyone have tried to build huge businesses on top of it.

I mean, sure, it's sort of usable, but the churn is insane. And we're burning the planet (and probably the economy, too) for it.