The library is deterministic, but looking for the library isn't. In the same way that generating code is not deterministic, but the generated code normally is.
Re:Karpathy on Programming
by Night_Thastus on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @12:56PM
(#46435987)
I...guess? But once you know of a good library for problem X, you don't need to look for it anymore. I guess if you have a bunch of developers and 0 control over what they do, and they're free to drag in additional dependencies willy-nilly, then yes, that part isn't deterministic? But that's a much bigger problem than anything library-related...
If I use a library, I know it will do the same thing from the same inputs, every time. If I don't understand something about its behavior, then I can look to the documentation. Some are better about this, some are crap. But a good library will continuing doing what I want years or decades later.
An LLM can't decide between one sentence and the next what to do.