And they're as deterministic as as the underlying thing they're abstracting... which is kinda what makes an abstraction an abstraction.

I get that people love saying LLMs are just compilers from human language to $OUTPUT_FORMAT but... they simply are not except in a stretchy metaphorical sense.

That's only true if you reduce the definition of "compiler" to a narrow `f = In -> Out`. But that is _not_ a compiler. We have a word for that: function. And in LLM's case an impure one.