Magic of getting different answers

I’ve been fighting non-determinism my entire career as a developer. Race conditions. Timing issues. Environmental dependencies. “Works on my machine” has driven me borderline crazy, on the verge of throwing the computer out the window.

I write deterministic code that for some odd reason acts unpredictable anyway.

So when generative AI shows up giving a different essay every time you ask the same question, I’m not thrown by it. I already have the mental scaffolding for unpredictable systems.

Most people spent decades learning that computers do exactly what you tell them. Press save. It saves. Run the command again. Same result. Then AI arrives and suddenly feels like magic.

But turns out most developers aren’t fazed by this. We’re already trauma bonded with systems that should be predictable but aren’t.

Most people think: computer does what I tell it to do.

Developers think: computer usually does what I tell it to do, except when the database has opinions.

We’ve all filed bug reports that start with “sometimes” or “intermittently.” Trying to reproduce something that works fine on Tuesday but fails on Wednesday for reasons nobody can explain.

For once the non-determinism isn’t a bug to fix. It’s working as intended.

After spending years hunting down every source of randomness in our systems, we’re now building tools where randomness is the core feature.

So the thing everyone else finds magical is what we’ve been trying to eliminate for decades.