  > The answer they always give is that compilers are deterministic and therefore trustworthy in ways that LLMs are not.

I don't see this as a frequent answer tbh, but I do frequently see claims that this is the critique.

I wrote much more here[0] and honestly I'm on the side of Dijkstra, and it doesn't matter if the LLM is deterministic or probabilistic

  It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable, and, in view of the history of mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do the job well enough would require again a few thousand years.
  - Dijkstra: On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

His argument has nothing to do with the deterministic systems[1] and all to do with the precision of the language. His argument comes down to "we invented symbolic languages for a good reason".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928421

[1] If we want to be more pedantic we can actually codify his argument more simply by using some mathematical language, but even this will take some interpretation: natural language naturally imposes a one to many relationship when processing information.