> But is this "stochastic nature" inherent to the LLM?
At any kind of reasonable scale, yes. CUDA accelerators, like most distributed systems, are nondeterministic, even at zero temperature (which you don't want) with fixed seed.
> The issues starts when the software starts living longer
There's going to be a bifurcation; caricaturing it, "operating system kernels" and "disposable code". In the latter case, you don't maintain it; you dispose of it and vibe-code up a new one.
What this is saying is "you need an objective criterion you can use as a success metric" (aka a verifiable reward in RL terms). "Design of verifiers" is a specific form of domain expertise.
This applies to exploits, but it applies _extremely_ generally.
The increased interest in TLA+, Lean, etc comes from the same place; these are languages which are well suited to expressing deterministic success criteria, and it appears that (for a very wide range of problems across the whole of software) given a clear enough, verifiable enough objective, you can point the money cannon at it until the problem is solved.
The economic consequences of that are going to be very interesting indeed.
Inside scoop: the pub group who owned that pub (still going, owns four in Cambridge and environs) was cofounded by Steve Early, a Cambridge computer scientist who wrote his own POS software, so it was very much a case of "yeah, that sounds like fun, I'll add it". (Until tax and primary rate risk made it not fun, so it was removed.)
reply