> I’d say that, in all the ways that matter, I understand the code. Sure, if I had to hand-edit it now, there’d be a serious learning curve. But I won't have to.

Famous last words, but point is taken.

The non deterministic nature of an llm breaks the metaphor that they are like a compiler.

However, it’s not foreign to compilers to receive feedback from the running program (PGOs), so there are still parallels to the feedback we provide LLMs that guide their “optimization”.

I think even calling LLMs a non-deterministic compiler isn’t accurate either so ultimately I agree the metaphor doesn’t quite work.

I do think LLMs are like compilers in terms of how they changed how we build programs from a historical context. But that’s about it.

The non-determinism is theoretical solvable. Chaos (prompt instability) isn’t. When you change a single word in the input, you get a completely different output. Because of this LLMs will never be compilers.