I keep seeing lots of people saying "LLMs are like compilers/assemblers for prompts"

[alina@girldick.gay]

@cwebber @joeyh the binding of isaac, enter the gungeon and dead cells are worse than a slot machine for my adhd brain

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@cwebber oh, they could… if you operated them yourself. Snapshotting, and saving the PRNG seed.

[rdviii@famichiki.jp]

@cwebber mostly agree, especially about them not being compilers, but some compilers aren't deterministic. You'll get a different result in memory layout or optimization sometimes. Especially for quantum compilers, where the compilation process itself is known to be NP hard, so heuristics are used.

[ckfinite@universeodon.com]

@cwebber I think that the lack of determinism is less important than the lack of a precise mapping between input and output. If we hypothesize a nondeterministic compiler that exposes a precise semantics, you can statistically predict the output based on the input based on the stochastic compilation process. LLMs don't give any such guarantee: you put imprecise natural language in and then the output is vibesy related to the input. Small changes to the input can beget very large changes to the output.

[kkarhan@infosec.space]

@eramdam @cwebber +1

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@cwebber
PGO go brrrrr

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@cwebber This is more like the Pentium 4 idea of predictive branching, but with even larger pipeline stalls. Except the P4 could still do math.

[osma@mas.to]

For the people who compare an LLM to a compiler, the latter are not deterministic. They can not understand how sometimes* programs work, and sometimes they do not. The fault for this must be in the computer - hence LLMs equal compilers.

*depending on source code input and running conditions.
@cwebber

[cdonat@hostsharing.coop]

@rdviii @cwebber

Heuristics aren't non-deterministic by definition. Of course it is possible to come up with non-deterministic heuristics, just like with any kind of algorithm. But by far most heuristics are very deterministic, just like most algorithms are, heuristic, or not.

[ryanc@infosec.exchange]

@drwho @cstanhope @mcc @mntmn @cwebber Honestly, I would prefer LLM generated code over grad student generated code.

[yaleman@mastodon.social]

@rdviii Ok but who's actually talking about *quantum compilers* when they are just saying "compilers" as a general term? ... other than people who work exclusively on QC's, who would be ... an incredibly tiny minority :)

[carl@chaos.social]

@cwebber I am really Hung-up on the non-deterministic Character of LLMs lately. This essential quality makes them fit for solving specific kinds of problems und TOTALLY unfit for other kinds of problems.
I am working on my wisdom to get this right for each given problem.

[kkarhan@infosec.space]

@cwebber precisely that!

A #shitposting - Program is anything but #reproduceable and I want #ReproduceableBuilds for #auditability, #security and #transparency.

• That's the whole reason I do @OS1337: To have something so fundamentally simple and compact that it is (at least in theory - at some point) financially feasible to crowdfund complete code audits of the entire system.
  • I don't want people to trust me blindly, but to earn trust in the few things I code.

That's why I treat any "#AI" / #AIslop the same way @dolphin treat any leaks from Nintendo:

• I'm not even gonna look at it!

[pautasso@scholar.social]

@cwebber if, just like with asm, reading and reviewing generated code is not longer a necessary thing, then the productivity bottleneck shifts to how much time is spent "engineering" the prompt.

[littledetritus@geraffel.social]

@cwebber This might actually be subject to change though.

Njoy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22954

Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)

tl;dr: LLMs are coming closer and closer to conveying reproducible outputs. One could be under the impression that if trained on the same data and towards a certain size asymtotic behaviour would be a resonable expectation, becaus that happens with large numbers in statistics.

What a ... surprise.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ansuz @joeyh And of course there is the question, what is and isn't a compiler? Aren't all functions compilers?

Indeed, Blender's rendering system is in many ways a compiler for images.

But we don't use that way, because it's not helpful, even though Blender and ffmpeg are MORE of compilers than LLMs are. People are reaching for "LLMs might be compilers!" because of the thing they want it to *do* rather than how it *acts*, even though Blender and ffmpeg are by far, under those definitions, much more of compilers than LLMs are.