[wgd]

People say "determinism" but I don't think that's actually the property we care about. For instance you could imagine a compiler that makes heavy use of superoptimization with random search and it would still have the ineffable quality that LLM codegen lacks. I think what we're actually trying to say is that the compiler preserves the formal semantics of the source language in its output, whereas English text doesn't have any such formal semantics to preserve.