If you can't replay it, you can't ship it
This is the third post in a six-part series on AI delegation, trust, and authority. Read the series introduction here.
The second of the five questions this series asks about trusting AI is the simplest one to ask and the hardest one to answer in production: will the AI do the same thing twice given the same input?
As people learn how to work with this new technology, they adapt. Experienced practitioners of AI chatbots quickly learn that asking the same question produces different answers — large language models sample randomly from a probability distribution. In fact this can help with tasks like generating variations of ideas to pick from and discern.
When AI is generating code, however, it becomes more critical. Most programming languages let you express the same logic in many different ways, so you can get code that works but is implemented in many different variations. The AI is taking your unstructured prompt and turning it into highly structured code — along the way it may choose different paths to get to the end goal.
For humans, this has been a way to judge code quality. Code smells, best practices, and style guides offer rough rules — the "Pythonic" way to write Python code, for example — but because these languages are designed to be expressive, flexible, and powerful, there are no hard rules on how code is written.