The end of Software Engineering (as we know it) | Jan Bosch

Good morning, everyone! How are you doing so far? Having a good conference? Excellent. Aren't you happy to talk about the end of software engineering? You know, I couldn't resist and start this talk, actually, with a picture that I asked ChatGPT to generate. "What does the end of software engineering look like?" According to ChatGPT, it looks like this. And then I politely added 'as we know it', just for a bit of a feeling. I work with tonnes and tonnes of companies. So, rather than being at one company, I work for a lot of different ones, and I'll explain to you later on why that is. What I see is two trends. On the one hand, generative AI. Everyone is looking at how we make better use of AI. I listened to the talks this morning, and this comes up all the time. On the other hand, especially here within Europe, and I know the UK is no longer part of the European Union, but I'm pretty sure you have something similar going on, there is all this regulation going on. We have GDPR, the Data Act, the AI Act, the Product Liability Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, the Regulation on Cybersecurity and Software Updates, etc. One of the companies that I work with that builds trucks that they ship around the world, they are subject to somewhere between 250 and 300 regulations. So, this is a little bit of a challenge for many of these people. But what I wanted to talk to you about is what is happening in software engineering. This is what you all recognise as the old way of doing software engineering. It is, you have an intent, you generate requirements based on that intent. Out of that, you design an architecture or some kind of software design, and out of that comes code. Out of that code, you put in operation that becomes a system in operation. If you ask me where software engineering is going, it is going to look like this in the future. We express an intent, and then some set of agents will take that intent, turn it into quantified outcomes, generate a set of requirements out of those outcomes, generate an architecture and a design out of that system, the code, and that then leads to a system in operation. The whole notion that we are going to be sitting there coding is, I think, going away very rapidly. And anyone who is using any of the modern tools is probably realising that as we speak. And I have lots of examples. Actually, I was in an interview yesterday with someone from a large German company, something in common with my last name that I will not mention. But basically, they now have an enterprise architect and a set of AI agents, and the enterprise architect basically does not need any developers anymore because the agents have taken it over for him. So, that's where we're going. How is this going to happen? Well, at the operational level, we're going to have reinforcement learning, I think it's one of the big techniques. And at the higher level, it's going to be vertical AI agents. Agents that have a specific job to do a specific task and generate the things that you need to have. And I think it's important to think about this. The world is changing very aggressively, and every company that I work with is trying to figure out how to do this. We are no longer building systems. We are going to grow systems. Out of this comes a system, and then we give it some more input and say, "We didn't quite mean it like that. We actually meant it more like this". That's where I see the world of software engineering going. And that's why we have the title of the presentation. Of course, we're not there yet. So, what I now see is that many of the companies are looking for a way to connect those two things. "What do we do offline? What do we let humans do?" "What do we do online and let the system do?" I think those are the questions we're currently struggling with.