Wait... why?

Making an unreliable, nondeterministic system give reliable results for a bounded task with well-understood parameters is... like half of engineering, no?

There's a huge difference between "generate this code here's a vague feature description" and "here's a list of criteria, assign this input to one of these buckets" -- the latter is obviously subject to prompt engineering, hallucination, etc -- but so can a human pipeline!

There’s a whole range between completely random and completely rule based deterministic.

Somewhere in between that I guess is the varying levels of intelligence more likely able to make the “right” decision for anything you throw at it.

I would hope that when engineers speak of LLM determinism they just mean it as shorthand for close to 1 under expected conditions

I mean, with reliability there's a spectrum. If the risks that an unreliable outcome brings aren't all that bad, then sometimes it's worth it to chase "my agents made an acceptable PR 70% of the time, can I get it to 90?"

Determinism is a different matter. Scripts and hooks are really the main levers you can pull there, but yeah - a a decent script and a cron job will handle certain things much better (and for a fraction of the cost)

This is something I think some people are fundamentally not capable of understanding.