The future of software engineering

Many of our group members have a software engineering background. In the past few years, software engineering has changed profoundly as LLMs rapidly got better at the verifiable aspects of the discipline. In this meetup event, we call on members who are thinking deeply about the ongoing transformation. We would love to hear your informed opinions on how software engineering will look in the future, both as a profession and as a field of study.

We know that opinions on this topic range widely, and we expect questions like the following will come up during the discussion:

• Code review: Must humans review agent-written code, or is it possible to skip this step?
• Education: So far, most software engineering courses required the student to write code to solve problems. When most of those problems are solved by prompting an agent, how must education evolve?
• Abstraction ladder: Is an agent (or its prompt) a higher abstraction layer on top of high-level languages, just like high-level languages are an abstraction layer on top of low level languages?
• Creativity: Models still lag behind humans in the creative aspects of software engineering, including the ability to ask the right questions, building intuitive interfaces, and writing well-organized code. Does this matter at all, and if so, why?

We would love to hear your views on these topics.

The rough plan for the evening:

18:30 - 19:00: Arrival and networking with pizza and drinks
19:00 - 19:30: Introduction
19:30 - 21:30: Round table discussion, where we collectively discuss the event topic.

There is a small prerequisite for attending this event. When you RSVP, you will be asked to link to your favorite blog post / X post / paper / book that says something original / interesting on this topic.

We require this to ensure that all attendees reference a well-formulated view that other interested attendees may use as a starting point for further information. If you don't already know a good resource, simply Google search with your opinion / observation / prediction / argument on this topic, and you will most likely find a good candidate.

We are looking forward to seeing you and having a great discussion!

Cheers!
- Alexandra, Dibya, Nico & Somayeh