Improving Determinism with LLMs: Prompting, Model Selection, Context, and Tools

Large language models are incredibly powerful, but they are not automatically deterministic. Ask the same question twice and you may get slightly different answers. Ask for facts without enough context and the model may fill in gaps. Ask it to perform complex matching or calculations directly in natural language and you may get an answer that sounds confident but is not reliable enough for production use. That does not mean LLMs are unreliable by default. It means we need to design around how th