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Comment by gyesxnuibh | Hacker News Reader

You ignored my comment about NFR. But, if you really wanna harp on the non-determinism. I don't think humans and LLMs are actually non-deterministic in the same way?

Humans are non-deterministic when compared between humans. But if you give a human the same task they can be pretty consistent. Models quality varies much more than a single human does and human's reasoning don't reset with their context window. Otherwise tenure wouldn't matter, companies wouldn't try to retain specific talent, and pay bands wouldn't be so wide. But thanks for spelling it out.

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> You ignored my comment about NFR.

You didn't seem to have a reputable point to address there. Just an assertion.

> I don't think humans and LLMs are actually non-deterministic in the same way?

Perhaps, but the author didn't make that argument. It's definitely easier to quickly vary skill in a model (by switching models) than it is to vary it in humans (by hiring/firing).

I don't see why that's bad. If anything it's better for AI - way easier to say "always use at least Astra/Opus 5.5" than it is to fire your crap employees.

I think some people have had the fortune to never actually work with poor programmers. They exist!

> You didn't seem to have a reputable point to address there. Just an assertion

I mean in my anecdotal evidence, AI has not been meeting bigger picture requirements and needs hand holding. Even on the newest models. So are you not experiencing that?

> I don't see why that's bad. If anything it's better for AI - way easier to say "always use at least Astra/Opus 5.5" than it is to fire your crap employees.

So you're saying you'd rather have AI make a consistently bad engineer inconsistently mid and a consistently good engineer inconsistently mid over what they usually are?

I much prefer consistency in my engineers. Especially when investing in them helps them improve.

And the reason I think it makes good engineers inconsistently mid is because look at the drop in quality as a customer from big tech which hires top talent. I had to cancel my Spotify subscription because it's become so sloppy.

> AI has not been meeting bigger picture requirements and needs hand holding. Even on the newest models. So are you not experiencing that?

Ah yeah in that case I agree. We're not quite at the point where completely hands-off vibe coding gives good results. But it seems very unlikely that that will still be true in a few years.

I mean I really hope that isn't true and AI stops improving or has some fundamental weakness that means it can never make long term maintainable code. Then I get to have a job! But I'm not going to believe something just because my job depends on it...

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