Making Sure Your Prompt Will Be There For You When You Need It

At Google, our team (Google Cloud Samples) uses Gemini to produce thousands of samples in batches. In doing so, we've learned that the biggest hurdle isn't the AI, it's our own expectations about these tools. As developers, we are wired for deterministic systems: we call a function and it produces the same result for the same input every time. This predictability allows for standard unit tests. Large Language Models (LLMs) however, are probabilistic and stochastic. They don't facts; they the likelihood of patterns and use a "sophisticated roll of the dice" to choose the next token.