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Comment by hadi121 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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