An AI assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. An application written by an AI assistant, if it doesn't just call an LLM at runtime, will mostly likely produce the same answer for the same inputs. That is, unless there's something intrinsic to its business logic that makes it nondeterministic.

Sometimes you really want the latter even if the former is less effort.

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Xirdus 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

A *human* assistant can give different answers for the same inputs. At some point, we'll need to stop treating computers as instruction executors and start treating them as autonomous agents. Non-determinism isn't a bug to be fixed, it's just the reality of working with this new kind of machines, and operators of those machines need to embrace that fact, like they did for human assistants.

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novafunc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And when applicable, the program would be much more efficient than the LLM.

So it would really be beneficial for the LLMs to be able to have their own environments to write and run code, but also to store those programs for later use automatically.

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toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I want an agent studio and execution sandbox where my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps with a receipt or transcript like history of what it did to create each app. Determinism built per use case with non deterministic assistance orchestrating the build and management layer. Extra credit if I can trivially share and collaborate with others per “deterministic silo” via a shared link. Something like Claude Code + AWS Lambda|(Docker|Podman) + Tangled.org with LLM code generation for my phone and workstation.

The LLMs empower for building, the determinism improves output-expectation alignment. It’s fundamentally an on device software factory, hypervisor, and storage system.

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Terr_ 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> my LLM driven assistant builds and maintains my apps

Remember when everyone was talking about treating computers as cattle rather than pets?

This seems like a weird inversion. Programs as pets instead of cattle. Toxoplasmosis, ahoy...

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Xirdus 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Cattle can do complex tasks too. Including managing other cattle.

Think of all those bad sci-fi movies where aliens take over Earth, enslave all humans and treat them like cattle. Very competent cattle that's put in charge of local governments, scientific research etc. but very much still cattle where individuals are entirely interchangeable and killing them is just everyday work. This is me and AI assistants. (I'm the aliens.)

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toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the code works good enough, it works good enough. If good enough is insufficient for success criteria, you’ll have to trade app evolution velocity and flexibility for more determinism via more human effort (“artisanal hand crafted”), evaluated on a per use case basis. “Does this software have to be good? How good? Have I hit diminishing returns yet?”

Pros and cons to code being cheap to generate now, it’s always about tradeoffs. I don’t want to build cars, I want to drive cars.

	▲	Terr_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Only in the sense that your build-a-car will be "good enough" as long as you never find out why your palms are always itchy, and you never press the brake so hard it stops working, and nobody determines which of the cars started the fireball during the accident. People suck at "good enough". All major engineering disasters were something "good enough" for somebody. People burn down their houses with "good enough" electrical work.