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

[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.