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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Basically what I’ve been saying since OldJob forced LLMs down our throats and pegging performance to usage metrics: why the fuck are we handing deterministic processes to probabilistic systems when it should be the other way around (using probabilistic systems to design deterministic ones)?

LLMS should be abstracted out of a process as soon as practicable, replaced with deterministic processes or procedures. Otherwise you’ve built the world’s most fragile process at the mercy of token cost, vendor hostility, geopolitics, and model deprecation.

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Actually... yes. I was bracing to be very annoyed with your comment starting with "why is everyone using AI so stupid?!" (I know those weren't your words, but it felt like that kind of post)

And then... yeah. You got it exactly right. Once a problem or process is deterministic, that's the wrong application of an LLM.

But I had never quite thought of it in these exact terms. The way I've been thinking about it up until now is that the very best way to use LLMs is to have them produce tools. The tools get to stay reliable and predictable. They boost your performance. But I think you found the more general abstraction of the same idea. Tool-making is not deterministic. But the tools themselves can be. That's why it fits. Trying to stuff LLMs into what's otherwise a deterministic process is an absurd waste and error-prone.

Smart. I like it.

Thats the best description I have heard of the problem so far. I ran into this recently where I automated a ton of stuff and got essentially threatened by leadership for not using AI. My system produces the same output 100% of the time, is free, and scales plus is reliable. Doing what they wanted with an LLM was fragile, didn't always produce the same output and was subject to costs. I don't think they could wrap their brains around it.

> got essentially threatened by leadership for not using AI.

This sounds made up or your workplace is rather odd to say the least. Maybe english isn't your first language and "threatened" is not the correct word?

You sound like someone thats never worked in a corporate environment. No, threatened is the correct word. I don't care if you like that or not.

It is not about me liking it or not. The word threaten comes with implications. This means they acted in hostile manner based on your words.

Directly threatening individuals and teams for petty reasons is sadly common practice in US corporate environments and among the reasons I adopted my current HN username.

They usually do it by saying there's something wrong with your performance. If your technical work is unimpeachable they'll manufacture some "soft skills" issue--like saying there's something wrong with your communication. They can always find fault if they go looking for it.

> … deterministic processes…

Just to be clear, software development itself is not deterministic, though? The software developer pushes a given business process from less-deterministic toward more deterministic? When we say we’ve “abstracted LLMs out of a process” we’d also say that we’ve abstracted software developers out that process as well?

I think a big part is the misperception that it’s “easier” and less effort to run stuff through LLM than to design an effective deterministic process.

Would love to know how you’ve managed to counter this as the drive to throw everything at LLMs is driving me insane.

I love the way you put this. Are there any sites or forums or places where people discuss/hash this out?

I've genuinely never considered it from this angle before.

Humans aren't deterministic. Determinism is a red herring. There are lots of other problems with agentic programming, but this is not at the top of the list.

I agree with the humans aren't deterministic, but I feel like that wasn't the scope of the original commentator. Humans are not deterministic, yes. Neither are LLMs. Both should be phased out of processes that need to be deterministic. What do you think?

I don't think processes have to be deterministic. Results should be, in the following sense: Both humans and LLMs should write software that is well-written, well-tested, well-documented, and that meets the spec. But this still leaves a lot of room for creativity (or rolling dice).

Oh yeah totally agree

> Humans aren't deterministic

Thus why we replaced computers (flesh and blood people writing out calculations) with computers (silicon-based number-crunching machines).

"Humans don't always sum two integers correctly. Getting the correct sum is a red herring! There are lots of other problems with my beehive-based calculator [0], but that is not at the top of the list..."

It doesn't matter what we are, what matters is what we want, and whether what we built actually works the way we want it to work.

[0] Discworld's Ponder Stibbons would be rolling in his, grave, or more likely his "Early Death package" pocket-dimension jar.

See my reply to the sibling. Yes, it matters that the outcome is a working system! It doesn't matter whether the system was created by a human pressing keys on a keyboard.

This is exactly right. Abstracted out of the process, or to a point of most optimal application.

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