Do I need to code now? Software engineering in the era of generative AI.

So-called "AI tooling" seems to obviate the need to write code, but there is a lot more to software engineering than throwing text at an editor.

The generative AI era is well and truly blooming with tools to help you do almost anything at all. Simply describe what you want and it's there at the click of an OK button. This empowers a lot of people to realise their imaginings without needing the traditional production skills: artwork, stories, summaries, video clips, everything seems to be in our reach.

As it turns out, not quite everything is in our reach. Students of abstraction will immediately be aware of the limitations of provision by description. Philosophers will interrogate the ability of a machine to understand itself. Software engineers will query the integration of code into existing ecosytems. A moment's thought will drive everyone to consider the relevance of context.

In this talk we'll look at how much generative AI is actually capable of when writing software, and where the humans must step in. We'll look at the nature of coding, survey the difference between coding and software engineering, consider what generative AI actually does, examine the three arts of debugging, optimising and abstracting, and consider how you will outperform generative AI. We'll look at how context is everything, how our brains are different from computers, and how human factors are really quite hard to encapsulate in a limited context window. We'll also discover how easy it is to say AI instead of generative AI, and the problems this causes.

Guy Davidson is the convenor of the C++ standard committee and a game developer of over 45 years, nearly 25 years of that time at Creative Assembly leading engineering practice on the Total War franchise. In that time he has written a lot of code and looked at a lot of other people's code. He has also written Beautiful C++, published by Pearson in 2022, lectured around the world, and helped to steer the C++ programming language along the path of righteousness. He sings first bass for the Brighton Festival Chorus and wears a cardigan in cold weather.

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