When humans are in the loop everything pretty much becomes stochastic as well. What matters more is the error rate and result correctness. I think this shifts the focus towards test cases, measurement, and outcome.

No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.

You don't? I do.

A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.

Sounds like a skill issue, honestly.

Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter…..

Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too!

The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.

a stochastic system can can deterministic sub-parts, a deterministic system cannot have stochastic sub-parts.

Theres nothing stochastic about a human that hits a 147 mate nor a 9 darter mate. I cant believe people seriously post this nonsense.

If we are talking in terms of IRL/physics, there is no such thing as a deterministic system outside of theory - everything is stochastic to differing degrees - including you brain that came up with these thoughts.

As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.

> throw a dart ... great deal of uncertainty and nongdeterministic behavior in our everyday actions.

Throwing a dart could not be further away from programming a computer. It's one of the most deterministic things we can do. If I write if(n>0) then the computer will execute my intent with 100% accuracy. It won't compare n to 0.005.

You see arguments like yours a lot. It seems to be a way of saying "let's lower the bar for AI". But suppose I have a laser guided rifle that I rely on for my food and someone comes along with a bow and arrow and says "give it a chance, after all lots of things we do are inaccurate, like throwing darts for example". What would you answer?

We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.

I have a strong suspicion that the world is not as deterministic as you'd like it to be.

Or it is deterministic, but infinitely complex, so that also leaves us only with stochastic.

stochastic vs deterministic is arguable a property of modelling, not reality.

Something so complex that we cannot model it as deterministic is hence stochastic. We can just as easily model a stochastic thing by ignoring the stochastic parts.

separating subjective appearance of things from how we can conceptualise them as models begs a deeper philosophical question of how you can talk about the nature of things you cannot perceive.

I think that both of you are right to some extent.

It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable.

In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.

I remember one of my ex-bosses in 2015 telling us basically he was doing "intuitive programming" instead of rational. Worked quite well.

Not interested in joining a pile-on, but I just wanted to point out how difficult reproducible builds are. I think there's still a bit of unpredictability in there, unless we go to extraordinary lengths (see also: software proofs).

> This is the glaring fallacy!

It feels like toil because it's not the interesting or engaging part of the work.

If you're going to build a piece of furniture. The cutting, nailing, gluing are the "boiler plate" that you have to do around the act of creation.

LLM's are just nail guns.

and sanding. don't forget sanding. 90% of building furniture is sanding.

At least for me when woodworking, the cutting, nailing, and gluing are the fun bits. The sanding and finishing is the grunt work/boilerplate.

The AI BAD folks camping in this thread would be angry that you're still producing work that requires sanding.

Not me, because I know how to avoid falling into nonsense speculation based on worthless analogies :D

Sand away! Enjoy copying and pasting your nails, or having LLMs apply your varnish or whatever. I hope it brings happiness.

Maybe nail guns that have a chance to randomly shoot nails into your leg and apologize when you ask why it did that.

Great analogy. As someone else pointed out in a different subthread, quality furniture isn't held together with nails.

Great point, but there is absolutely no way of doing this for every framework and then maintain it for ages. It is logistically impossible.

How big a dent do you think we could make if poured $252 billion dollars[0] just into paying down all our towers of tech debt and developing clean abstractions for all these known problems?

[0]: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...

I imagine people pouring money expect at least 3/1 ROI in a couple of years.

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

Love this analogy.

Great analogy. We've attempted to produce these systems and every time what emerges is software which makes easy things easy and hard things impossible.

Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer.

Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.

Rather, it is boilerplate that replicates hammers along with nails.

>Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer

It's rather saying that we should have parts that join without nailing by now, especially for things we do again and again and again and again.

Did you read shouldn’t when they wrote should?

I didn’t say it should exist, only implied it’s a practical inevitability for the moment.

Carpenters/framers are less skilled and paid less than cabinetmakers. But the world needs more carpenters.

The value is where the demand is, or where the market values it and not just in a skill of working with wood with tools to create nearly anything.

While it sounds likely true for the US, it's the opposite in Germany: likely due to societal expectations on "creature comforts" and German homes not being framed with 2x4's but instead getting guild-approved craftsmen to construct a roof for a brick building (with often precast concrete slabs forming the intermediate floors; they're segmented along the non-bridging direction to be less customized).

You can design furniture without nails or screws. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_carpentry

Reason Japanese carpenters do or did that is that sea air + high humidity would absolutely rot anything with nail and screw.

No furniture is really designed from a single tree, though. They aren't massive enough.

I agree with overall sentiment. But the analogy is higly flawed. You can't compare physical things with software. Physical things are way more constrained while software is super abstract.

> Reason Japanese carpenters do or did that is that sea air + high humidity would absolutely rot anything with nail and screw.

The other reason was that iron was very expensive in Japan as they had only low quality iron ore.

I can and will compare them, analogies don’t need to be perfect so long as they get a point across. That’s why they’re analogies, not direct perfect comparisons.

I very much enjoy the Japanese carpentry styles that exist though, off topic but very cool.

Even Star Trek has self-sealing stem bolts, they don't just 3d print their ships

They do sometimes 3D print at least smaller ships by the 2380s.

There are construction systems, for example in Japanese traditional architecture, that use no nails or screws. Good joinery often removes their need.

Since we invented the tree and control its parameters and features, this is actually correct.

We’re limited by the limits of our invention though. We can’t set the parameters and features to whatever we want, or we’d set them to “infinitely powerful” and “infinitely simple” - it doesn’t work like that however.

Those parameters of the invention that limit people from just doing away with boilerplate are ones they won't change, not can't.

Well, depending on the value proposition, or the required goals, that’s not necessarily true. There are pros and cons to different approaches, and pretending there aren’t downsides to such a switch is problematic.

I can tell you about 1000 ways, the problem is there are no corporate monetary incentives to follow them, and not much late-90s-era FOSS ethos going around either...

By that, you must admit that at least in a sense you imply they’re not cost effective, or practical.

This is a terribly confused analogy, afaict. But maybe if you could explain in what sense boilerplate, as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_text, is anything like a nail, it could be less confusing.

Yes and its why AI fills me with impending doom: handing over the reigns to an AI that can deal with the bullshit for us means we will get stuck in a groundhog day scenario of waking up with the same shitty architecture for the foreseeable future. Automation is the opposite of plasticity.

I don’t think that will happen. It’s more like a 3d printer where you can feed in a new architecture and new design every day and it will create it. More flexibility instead of less.

I find it more likely it will result in an influx of new architectures.

Eventually, prog-lang designers will figure out how to get llms to create new prog-langs.

Maybe if you fully hand over the reigns and go watch Youtube all day.

LLMs allow us to do large but cheap experiments that we would never attempt otherwise. That includes new architectures. Automation in the traditional sense is opposite of plasticity (because it's optimizing and crystalizing around a very specific process), but what we're doing with LLMs isn't that. Every new request can be different. Experiments are more possible, not less. We don't have to tear down years of scaffolding like old automated systems. We just nudge it in a new direction.

Ground Hog day is optimistic, I think. It will be like "The Butterfly Effect": every attempt to fix the systems using the same dumb, wrote solutions will make the next iteration of the architecture worse and more shitty.

nothing prevents stochastic agents from producing reliable, deterministic and correct programs. it's literally what the agents are designed for. it's much less wasteful than me doing the same work and much much less wasteful trying to find a framework for all frameworks.

I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.

Reliably correct is good, but why does it need to be fully deterministic?

Reduced mental load. When it’s proven that a set of input will always result in the same output, you don’t have to verify the output. And you can just chain process together and not having to worry about time wasted because of deviations.

Good point. Non-determinism is not fundamentally problematic on many levels. What is important is that the essential behavioral invariants of the systems are maintained.

Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad?

I actually think I like the idea that, maybe by handling my boilerplate over to AI we can be more comfortable with having boilerplate to begin with.

> Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad?

No. That is a result of bad software engineer practices and stacks, not a symptom of proper abstraction.

This is very true. For the most basic approaches of using stochastic agents for this purpose, especially with genralized agents and approaches.

It is possible to get much higher quality with not just oversight, but creating the alignment from the stochastic agents to have no choice but to converge towards the desired vector of work reliably.

Human in the loop AI is fine, I'm not sure that everything doesn't to be automated, it's entirely possible to get further and more reps in on a problem with the tool as long as the human is the driver and using the stochastic agent as a thinking partner and not the other way around.