"If this future was visible 15 years ago in research, what is visible now that is coming in 15 years? In my view, I believe that most of the central issues about programming and software engineering will not be about code construction, but about everything before and after construction: namely, requirements and verification. Deciding what to make, why to make it, and whether what is made actually achieves these goals, these are the next frontier of software."
"But these two big challenges have very different 'attack surfaces', if you will. Verification has long been studied in software engineering research, and I'm highly confident that its decades of sophisticated techniques will be brought to bear on large language model-driven synthesis to eventually create highly productive iterative loops of querying and verification, automating much of the construction and evaluation of programs. Give the research community 10-15 more years and we will see consistently high quality programs for this 80% of routine programs emerging from these models."
"But what this will do is put great pressure on requirements."
