jargon

Applied AI·Evaluation and reliability

you sent the same prompt twice and got two different answers, and nothing in your code changed between the calls.

Non-determinism

Draft summary, pending review

The same input yielding different outputs run to run, due to sampling and infrastructure. Consequences: evals need multiple runs or temperature 0 to be stable, and 'it worked when I tried it' is not evidence. Design tests and retries with this as a baseline fact.

Commonly confused with