I'm not sure why people struggle with the fact that an abstraction can be built on top of a non-deterministic and stochastic system. Many such abstractions already exist in the world we live.
Take sending a packet over a noisy, low SNR cell network. A high number of packets may be lost. This doesn't prevent me, as a software developer, from building an abstraction on top of a "mostly-reliable" TCP connection to deliver my website.
There are times when the service doesn't work, particularly when the packet loss rate is too high. I can still incorporate these failures into my mental model of the abstraction (e.g through TIMEOUTs, CONN_ERRs…).
Much of engineering and reliability history revolves around building mathematical models on top of an unpredictable world. We are far from solving this problem with LLMs, but this doesn't prevent me from thinking of LLMs as a new level of abstraction that can edit and transform code.
Take sending a packet over a noisy, low SNR cell network. A high number of packets may be lost. This doesn't prevent me, as a software developer, from building an abstraction on top of a "mostly-reliable" TCP connection to deliver my website.
There are times when the service doesn't work, particularly when the packet loss rate is too high. I can still incorporate these failures into my mental model of the abstraction (e.g through TIMEOUTs, CONN_ERRs…).
Much of engineering and reliability history revolves around building mathematical models on top of an unpredictable world. We are far from solving this problem with LLMs, but this doesn't prevent me from thinking of LLMs as a new level of abstraction that can edit and transform code.