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by kstenerud 33 days ago
> And the "weaver", to use the AOP term, is simply the LLM that generates the program from the documents.

Oh HELL NO.

The LAST thing you want is a non-deterministic process monkey patching your code.

4 comments

This is, indeed, the next generation of AOP: they've managed to evolve it from "extremely complex and hard to understand runtime behavior" into "completely undefined runtime behavior". UB as a service. True innovation!
That's what all the customers are demanding.
Our customers are CEOs and CTOs - kinda checks out.
That's where I got an immediate migraine.

  > The LAST thing you want is a non-deterministic process monkey patching your code.
I'm not poking fun of you, but the irony here is that code-as-written is mostly a "suggestion" to modern compilers and JIT interpreters and the actual instructions emitted often look nothing like your ver-batim code.
Compilers are deterministic. You can control all the input to the compiler and the environment it runs in to get reproducible builds. This isn't an accident. That's best practice.
okay but at least those are provably equivalent, unless my understanding is off. isn't that the whole impetus behind the idea of functional programming?
At the end of the day aren't we all just non-deterministic process monkeys patching code?
Humans might be non-deterministic, but we can reason, we can learn, and we can have incentives to be careful and not just YOLO things, all of which mitigate that risk. None of those is true of LLMs.
i feel like you've just accidentally stumbled upon primate-patching as an umbrella term that can be anything from monkey-patching to hominid-adjustment via apefoolery. As a coder for 8 years I know I'm personally capable of operating at any of these levels depending on the day and the strength of the local coffee.
If you squint hard enough in ignorance, everything looks non-deterministic.

We need to stop the pseudophilosophy already. At this point, the AI bros think they have cornered some grand problem. If the universe is deterministic, then we can simulate it perfectly and humans and their other machines are all redundant. If the universe is non-deterministic, then stochastic AI "will eventually get better" and can replace humans too.

Have you considered there's something obviously missing with this reasoning, and you're wrong about this like the rest of us? This is not that profound.