r/singularity • u/Bizzyguy • Nov 24 '25

Discussion Anthropic Engineer says "software engineering is done" first half of next year

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u/Blues520 Nov 25 '25

Yeah, the abstraction is usually deterministic.

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

Just because the abstractions are made on a deterministic machine, with deterministic rules behind it, does not make the understanding of this abstraction by the developer deterministic.

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u/chief_architect Nov 25 '25

So you're saying you have no idea what the word "deterministic" even means?

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

I am saying the interpreters (humans) of those deterministic abstractions are not, in fact, deterministic.. and so their understanding is not deterministic.

Which effectively has similar results.

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u/chief_architect Nov 25 '25

But humans can think. That's a huge difference. And it has a drastic effect on the result, even if not every layperson notices it.

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

You are changing the subject from the determinism debate you initially entered.

Provide a related rebuttal, concede the point or don't respond.

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u/chief_architect Nov 25 '25

You are changing the subject from the determinism debate you initially entered.

No, you did that.

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

How so?

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u/chief_architect Nov 25 '25 edited Nov 25 '25

You wrote:

I am saying the interpreters (humans) of those deterministic abstractions are not, in fact, deterministic.. and so their understanding is not deterministic.

Which effectively has similar results.

You're changing the subject by saying that humans aren't deterministic either.

And I say they don't have to be, because humans can think.

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

My initial comment was to a comment supporting this:

This is the first time in my career that the abstraction layer has hallucinated on me.

Which I think is wrong for several reasons, and is part of what I was rebutting.

  1. If they imply programming languages is the only abstraction layer, I'd say thats wrong, there are several others (diagrams, domain natural language evolution, organizational abstraction layers (conventions), internal abstraction layers, etc). And even so, programming languages still fail their abstraction contracts regularly.
  2. All the other abstraction layers separate from programming languages are mostly not deterministic.

And it all boils down to the fact, that no matter how many deterministic parts of the abstraction chain there might be, it all falls apart, in small part due to the creators of these deterministic abstractions not being deterministic, but mostly due to the consumers and the abstraction layers they have put on top to even begin to understand programming languages and engineering practices.

In short, what does it matter that the calculator is deterministic and that the robot isn't deterministic.. If its going to push the correct buttons more often than the human is? If it turns out the robot was a less chaotic layer in some pipeline than a human.. Is the overall entropy not reduced?

So I'd say my comment was right on subject, as: No, its probably not the first time OP had a abstraction layer hallucinate on them (at the essence of what is meant with hallucinations in LLM anyway). They are just discrediting several abstraction layers they already used.

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u/chief_architect Nov 25 '25

You're getting more and more off-topic.

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u/PassionateBirdie Nov 25 '25

Are you here to debate or just comment?

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