| Just like LLMs, compilers are just another layer of abstraction and no they're not deterministic. Just yesterday I've reported a codegen bug in MSVC. (Luckily they've fixed it very fast.)
Can you realise that it's an optimiser bug without inspecting the assembly? Hardly. All the arguments people claim against LLMs are similarly applicable to compilers, but compilers are old technology and LLMs are new. If you're an expert, just about every compiled function contains obvious inefficiencies, and a skilled assembly programmer can speed it up by in the ballpark of 3x. If we're talking about your average webapp, you can usually get 1000x better resource usage in most ways, including CPU, RAM, storage and so on. And the output isn't deterministic either - the bugs no withstanding, code generation is highly chaotic, optimisations have non-local impacts and you can't easily predict optimised codegen output from source. LLMs aren't much worse. They have non-deterministic output, but you can steer it - similarly to a compiler. An expert can use it to gain great speed and efficiency, but in the hands of someone not as capable, you can make something awful just as fast. Both tools are force multipliers. |