Comment by fragmede

You say that as if tech hasn't always been a moving target anyway. The skills I spent months learning a specific language and IDE became obsolete with the next job and the next paradigm shift. That's been one of the few consistent themes throughout my career. Hours here and there, spread across months and years, just learning whatever was new. Sometimes, like with Linux, it really paid off. Other times, like PHP, it did, and then fizzled out.

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The other thing is, this need for determinism bewilders me. I mean, I get where it comes from, we want nice, predictable reliable machines. But how deterministic does it need to be? If today, it decides to generate code and the variable is called fileName, and tomorrow it's filePath, as long as it's passing tests, what do I care that it's not totally deterministic and the names of the variables it generates are different? as long as it's consistent with existing code, and it passes tests, whats the importance of it being deterministic to a computer science level of rigor? It reminds me about the travelling salesman problem, or the knapsack problem. Both NP hard, but users don't care about that. They just want the computer to tell them something good enough for them to go on about their day. So if a customer comes up to you and offers you a pile of money to solve either one of those problems, do I laugh in their face, knowing damn well I won't be the one to prove that NP = P, or do I explain to them the situation, and build them software that will do the best it can, with however much compute resources they're willing to pay for?