Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that's how I've approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology

They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less "orders" is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name "Luna"

They're as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you'll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes

And software isn't as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn't require it either, luckily. Every program you'll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably

Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.

You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox

AI is actually deterministic, a random input is usually included to let you get multiple outputs for generative tasks. And anyway, you could just save the "random" output when you get a good one.