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arXiv · 2409.00764

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

Eunsuk Kang·Mary Shaw
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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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Eunsuk Kang, Mary Shaw. 2024-09-01. tl;dr: Chill, y'all: AI Will Not Devour SE. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689492.3689816

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