"Most classical engineering fields deal with probabilistic system components all of the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say that inability to deal with probabilistic components is disqualifying from many engineering endeavors."
This is cope and fundamentally misrepresents engineering. Engineers deal with a problem space that is probabilistic (although they try to model it as best as they can), but design solutions in a deterministic space. With LLMs the solution space itself is non-deterministic.
> It's not engineering if you're just guessing as to what is degrading the performance and what might improve it.
Engineering is literally the art of making educated guesses and then testing/proving/disproving/improving upon them. Nothing is exact. Everything is approximate. Iterate until the result is good enough.
This is false. A bridge is not built with approximations, it is built with a deep understanding of structural physics. Yes there are some unknowns, no it's not "educated guesses".
If you can identify gradient (what direction your change will impact the ultimate goal), then just repeating the process (or reverse-process) can find local maximum.
Still it can be a software engineering if the gradient candidate / measuring gradient / repeat process can be done at scale.
