The CFO ran the same prompt twice and got two answers, and now thinks the system is broken. The analogy that lands in one sentence, the honest framing that keeps trust, and the exact case where you'd set temperature to zero to make it repeat.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The CFO ran the same prompt twice and got two answers, and now thinks the system is broken. The analogy that lands in one sentence, the honest framing that keeps trust, and the exact case where you'd set temperature to zero to make it repeat.
The screen is whether the candidate can explain non-determinism to a non-technical exec WITHOUT jargon and WITHOUT being defensive, and above all whether they know it's a design choice with a control (temperature) rather than a flaw. The strong move is the analogy plus the offer to set temperature to 0 for the workflows that need reproducibility. The reserved follow-up: 'so just set it to zero everywhere then', and the answer is no, because deterministic does not mean correct, and zero temperature can make it repeat the same wrong answer every time.
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