"The" future of software engineering is a silly thing to predict. I might predict one substantial change is that we get our house a little more in order about universities and the private sector distinguishing between computer science, software engineering, and software development. Obviously they are not cleanly separated[1], but LLMs will affect each subfield very differently.

- The impact on computer science seems almost entirely negative so far: mostly the burden of academic wordslop, though an additional negative impact is AI sucking all the air out of the room. What's worse is how little interesting computer science has come out of the biggest technological development with computers in many years: in fact there has been a terrible and very sudden regression of scientific methodology and integrity, people rationalizing unscientific thinking and unprofessional behavior by pointing to economic success. I think it'll take decades to undo the damage, it's ideological.

- The impact on software development actually does seem a bit positive. I am not really a software developer at all. It always felt too frustrating :) However the easing of frustration might be offset by widespread devastation of new FOSS projects. I don't want to put my code online, even though I'm not monetizing it. I'm certainly not alone. That makes me really sad. But I watched ChatGPT copy-paste about 200 lines of F# straight from my own GitHub, without attribution. I'm not letting OpenAI steal my code again.

- Software engineering... it does not seem like any of these systems are actually capable of real software engineering, but we are also being adversely affected by an epidemic of unscientific thinking. Speaking of: I would like to see Mythos autonomously attempt a task as complex and serious as a C compiler. Opus 4.6 totally failed (even if popular coverage didn't portray it as such):

  The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

[1] They should have different educational tracks. There is no reason why a big fancy school like MIT can't have computer scientists do something like SICP and software engineers do the applied Python class. Forcing every computer professional into "computer science" is just silly; half the students gripe about how useless this theory is, the other half gripe about how grubby the practice is. What really sucks here is that I think Big Tech would support the idea, we're just stuck in a weird social rut.

To toss them because the level of damage they have done it's astounding. Tons of companies are still fixing the losses from vibe coding.

What we need it's better code analizers, lexers and the like. And LLM's are practically the opposite because they can't never, ever give a concise answer by design. Worse, they rot over time.

https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-...