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tl;dr: Chill, y’all: AI Will Not Devour SE

Published: 17 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Social media provide a steady diet of dire warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) will make software engineering (SE) irrelevant or obsolete. To the contrary, the engineering discipline of software is rich and robust; it encompasses the full scope of software design, development, deployment, and practical use; and it has regularly assimilated radical new offerings from AI. Current AI innovations such as machine learning, large language models (LLMs) and generative AI will offer new opportunities to extend the models and methods of SE. They may automate some routine development processes, and they will bring new kinds of components and architectures. If we're fortunate they may force SE to rethink what we mean by correctness and reliability. They will not, however, render SE irrelevant.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Onward! '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software
October 2024
315 pages
ISBN:9798400712159
DOI:10.1145/3689492
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 17 October 2024

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  1. AI-assisted development
  2. software correctness
  3. software engineering principles

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