Preferred form of modification [LWN.net]

Preferred form of modification

Posted Mar 10, 2026 19:50 UTC (Tue) by ptime (subscriber, #168171)
In reply to: Preferred form of modification by geofft
Parent article: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

Flex/bison involve a deterministic mapping between the high level abstraction and generated code. LLMs do not.

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Preferred form of modification

Posted Mar 10, 2026 20:17 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think this comment responds to any of the things I said about determinism, nor does it take into account any of the existing comments about how deterministic execution of LLMs is entirely possible.

Preferred form of modification

Posted Mar 11, 2026 0:15 UTC (Wed) by ptime (subscriber, #168171) [Link]

It might be possible, just like it might be possible to take the tires off a bike and put furniture casters on instead, but the nondeterminism is why people want to use the LLMs in the first place.

Preferred form of modification

Posted Mar 12, 2026 3:46 UTC (Thu) by gf2p8affineqb (subscriber, #124723) [Link]

But determinism isn't the only point. The point is that other tools have formal semantics, and that changes have a predictable local effect. Compare that to LLM where the semantics are "whatever it outputs" and no one can predict how the output changes in response to a change in input.