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Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense.

AI contribution is basically just "prompt + AI work". Even if you are okay with AI work per se, you should accept prompts (after reviewing them) and let your own AI generate the code (and then also review the code)... rather then accept an output of someone else's AI with an unknown prompt, that may or may not include an instruction to create a vulnerability.

In the age of AI, the prompt is becoming the actual source code. Accepting AI-generated code would be like accepting binary code from unknown source.

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I don't think we're approaching the limit of deterministic prompt -> source code mapping any time soon. Small variability in prompts produces medium variability in outputs. Building on previous outputs only extends the variability, where behavioral differences start appearing a few prompts down the line.

And the AI companies aren't focused on making this process any more deterministic, where repeated prompts are sampled using different seeds. I don't know if it's because the randomness makes the models explore a larger space and perform better, but it's probably intentionally done because it'd be quite easy to remove the stochasticity.

There’s another issue where models and transparent wrappers around models that get exposed are shifting around often. Versioning is highly questionable, and not all closed models will be supported indefinitely… so determinism becomes highly questionable at a purely prompt level.

Oh, I didn't even consider this. Now that you mentioned it, I wouldn't be surprised if the stochasticity is intentional so users don't treat it as deterministic, and the company is allowed to continuously update the model (or even a small part of its weights, perhaps to fix/censor something?).

This doesn't match my experience with prompting AI at all. In every professional application of AI I've seen, there are a huge number of variables and inputs, over many turns, that produce the output. We see radically different results across different engineers using AI, and that variance is not 100% attributable to the prompt. I don't even think it's 50% attributable. See sibling comment for some delineation of these additional parameters.

The correct policy is what Linux adopted. "We don't care what tools you use, provide high-quality PRs."

Not really though, since the result of the prompt is not deterministic. It greatly depends on the model, the version, the harness, even time of day if the provider's infrastructure is currently overloaded and is silently degrading performance. Some things also require multi-turn interactions.

100% agree with this. Was about to write the same thing.

this is the unintentional HN humor i come here for

> Not really though, since the result of the prompt is not deterministic. It greatly depends on the model, the version, the harness, even time of day if the provider's infrastructure is currently overloaded and is silently degrading performance. Some things also require multi-turn interactions.

All of that are even more reasons to reject AI-generated code: if it cannot be trusted to produce same (or even similar) output just from the prompts, why accept it at all?

This is why I have been asking to fire product owners. Givven the same input, but different software engineers working with them, they can produce different output (code).

It's worse than that! Even when the product managers inputs to the engineers are constrained for many problems no two engineers will produce consistent results! In fact recent studies suggest that even the same engineer may produce different results based on mood, if they've had coffee yet, and how near to EOD it is.

Except prompts aren’t deterministic, source code is.

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