This is the absolute opposite to using an LLM. Please stop using this comparison and perhaps look for others, like for example, a randomised search engine.
And he's right. LLMs are fancy text query engines and work very well as such.
The problem is when people try to shoehorn everything into LLMs. That's a disaster yet being perused vigorously by some.
In practice they seem to work well for that at a surface level, most of the time. The complaint is not that LLMs are not a tool for the job of "fancy text query engine", the complaint is that at scale and in the long run, LLMs are not a good tool for that.
And there are applications where you don’t have/wouldn’t pay another human, and the job that an AI does for mere cents is good enough most of the times. Like doing an analysis on a legacy codebase. I’ll read and verify, but running that “query” then saved me a lot of time.
Not everything needs to be deterministic to be of value.
There's obviously a value in practical tools, deterministic or not. It's just worth making the distinction that a practical tool is not always fit for purpose as the "right" tool if you really are seeking the (most) right tool for the job.