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Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?

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Re: Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?

#12

Post by brian-m »

I haven't done it with Claude Code itself, but I've built a deterministic + inferential engine that works inside a defined discipline with defined purposes. Broad enough to be practical, niche enough for most of the world to look at me funny.

The short version: let logic decide, and if there are multiple solutions let the model reason within a fixed range grounded by GraphRAG. Test every output against the logic, re-parse on contradiction, and emit 'unsure' after a couple of iterations rather than guessing.

It's no use for general knowledge. But where the judgement is largely codifiable it holds up well. There's an edge case out there that'll turn it to custard, I just haven't found it yet.

I've connected Claude Desktop to it over MCP and the results are good, not great. I designed the thing so I'm working in the sweet spot and there's still the occasional WTF.

Re: Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?

#13

Post by gmarkwa »

anonym29 wrote: post #2

Anyone telling you they have tamed LLMs into producing 100% deterministic answers has either scoped the problem space so narrowly as to border on meaningless (e.g. "Is earth flat?" with a structured output schema of a single JSON boolean value), hasn't done robust statistical validation to actually confirm truly deterministic outputs, or both. LLMs are fundamentally non-deterministic. Trying to use them to solve dete…

I mean they can be deterministic, thinking machines lab made deterministic LLM's: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in....

Although obviously I'd rather they stay non-deterministic

Re: Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?

#15

Post by otekengineering »

the same technique you use to get a human engineering team to generate a deterministic and repeatable result 100% percent of the time. i know that's a flippant (but true!) answer, it's just a pretty tough problem :) setting the bar lower than 100% makes it a lot more tractable

Re: Ask HN: What technique do you use to make Claude Code deterministic?

#17

Post by glawre »

I get Claude to write code and tests and then I review these carefully. I'm not doing any cutting edge SWE work, so this works fine for me. I also enjoy the bonus that once written it's deterministic, costs no tokens, and is no longer coupled to the AI provider or the government where they operate.
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