SE metrics (Software Engineering)

miroslawstaron/screenPong

miroslawstaron/screenTerminal

I was keen on testing the Software-on-demand hypothesis advocated by OpenAI in their last keynote, but it took me a moment to see how to test it. Then, I realized that I could work with creating screensavers based on my ideas. Not the ones that change images, we don’t need AI for that. The ones where you actually have to write you own source code!

So, first I did a dot that would spawn at different places of the screen with different sizes and colors. Just two minutes later I got the source code in C#, which I compiled using Visual Studio Code and it worked. No errors, just save the code and compile.

Then, I realized that a dot is pretty basic, so no challenge for the AI. So, I decided to ask for a pong game, Atari-style, that would be my screensaver. That took maybe a few moments longer for the AI to think, but it worked. Then “I” changed the logic a bit, made it into a car, asked for a counter and a few minuted/iterations later – I got the nice screen saver. It’s in the first repo if you want to try. AI even generated instructions how to compile it and install it (as readme.txt).

Finally, I thought about a screensaver that would print its own source code on the screen. The same story – few iterations and cool ideas led me to the second repository. I got the screen terminal saver. Quite cool.

But then, something happened! If you go into the repository, you will see that it only has one large file with all the code. So, I started to use AI to refactor it – split into smaller classes (instead of the internal ones), add comments, describe the logic, etc. None of that worked! It extracted the classes, but “forgot” to use them in the main Program.cs – my screensaver was empty. It added the comments, but mostly one liners about the functions, no description of the logic.

So, Keep Calm and Engineer Software I say – AI is not going to take advanced software engineering jobs!

How Do You Measure AI? | Communications of the ACM

Due to my background in software metrics, I’ve been interested about measurement of AI systems for a while. What I found is that there are benchmarks and suites of metrics used for measurement of AI. But….

When GPT-5 was announced, most of the metrics that they showed improved by 1-2%. They improved from 97-99%, which made me wonder whether we are so perfect or whether we need new ways of measuring generative AI systems.

As I see it, we need new metrics and new benchmarks. I like the “humanity’s last exam” benchmark, because it is still not saturated. It is a great benchmark, but if we have a perfect score on that benchmark, will it be able to constuct good generative AI software? Or will we make software that is very good in theory and not useful in practice?

In this article, the authors offer an opinion on this topic, supporting my view and also indicating that source code generation is one of the areas where metrics are getting more mature than in others. CodeBLEU and CodeROUGE are better than their non-code correspondence. This is because the take domain knowledge into the consideration.

Let’s see what new benchmarks will pop up when GPT-5 becomes even more popular.

OpenAI’s latest keynote put one idea forward: coding is shifting from writing lines to expressing intent. With GPT-5’s push into agentic workflows—and concrete coding gains on benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified—the “software on demand” era is no longer speculative. You describe behavior; an agent plans, scaffolds, implements, runs tests, and iterates. Humans stay in the loop as product owners and reviewers.

What’s different now isn’t just better autocomplete. OpenAI’s platform updates (Responses API + agent tooling) are standardizing how models call tools, navigate repos, and execute tasks, turning LLMs into reliable collaborators rather than clever chatboxes. The keynote storyline mirrored what many teams are seeing: agents that can reason across files, operate tests, and honor constraints—then explain their choices.

There’s still daylight between today’s agents and fully autonomous engineers—OpenAI itself acknowledged the limits—but the arc is clear. In the near term, expect product teams to specify features as executable specs: a prompt plus acceptance tests. Agents draft code; CI catches regressions; humans approve merges. The payoff is faster iteration and broader access: more people can “program” without memorizing frameworks, while specialists curate architecture, performance, and safety. The Guardian

If you’re experimenting, start small: encode user stories as tests, let an agent propose patches, and gate everything behind your normal review. The orgs that win won’t be the ones that replace engineers—they’ll be the ones that instrument intent, tests, and guardrails so agents can ship value on demand.

I’m already pass that – experimenting at large with prompts writing requirements, LLMs using design patterns and developing add-ins to Visual Studio to make these tools available.

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Suggested research & resources

• SWE-bench & SWE-bench Verified – Real-world GitHub issue benchmark (plus a human-validated subset) used to measure end-to-end software fixing by LLMs/agents. Great for evaluating “software on demand” claims. arXivOpenAI
• SWE-agent (NeurIPS 2024) – Shows that agent-computer interfaces (file navigation, test execution) dramatically improve automated software engineering. Useful design patterns for your own agents. proceedings.neurips.ccarXiv
• AutoDev (Microsoft, 2024) – Framework for autonomous planning/execution over repos, with strong results on code and test generation; a good reference for multi-tool agent loops. arXivVisual Studio Magazine
• OpenAI: New tools for building agents (2025) – Overview of the Responses API and how to wire tools/function-calling for robust agent behavior. OpenAI

In the last few days, OpenAI announced their newest model. The model seems to be really good. In fact, it is so good that the increase from the previous ones are in only 1% in some cases (from 98% to 99%). This means that we need better benchmarks to show how the models differ.

Well, the model is really something that I want to use now, not wait until next week. If this is the latest, I do not know what the next one will be!

But what is quantum computing? (Grover’s Algorithm)

If you are looking at the quantum computing, and you are a programmer, people start “dumbing-it-down” for you with telling about superpositions and multiple bits in one. Well, not entirely true and this is a misconception.

In this video, the author explains how quantum works, based on the mathematics. Don’t worry, it’s really approachable, without dumbing it down or mansplaining.

Thanks to my colleague who send me the video!

arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07343

Code generation in all forms, from solving problems to test case creation, adversarial testing, fixing security vulnerability, is super-popular in contemporary software engineering. It helps the engineers to be more efficient in their work, and it helps the managers to get more out of the resources at their disposal.

However, there is a bit of a darker side to it. We can all buy GitHub CoPilot or another add-in. We can even get the companies to set a special instance in their cloud for us. But it 1) costs and 2) uses a lot of energy, and 3) is probably a security risk as we need to send our code via an open network.

The alternative is to use publicly available models and create an add-in for the tool to use it. Fully on-site, no information even leaves premises (https://bit.ly/4iMNgrU). But, how good are these models.

In this paper, the authors studied models that are in the class that we can run on a modern desktop computer. Yes, we need a GPU for them, but a 4090 or 5090 would be enough. They tested: Llama, Gemma 2, Gemma 3, DeepSeek-R1 and Phi-4. They found that the Phi-4 model was a bit worse than the OpenAI’s GPT 03-mini-high, but it was very close. The 03-mini-high got ca. 87% correctness with pass@3, and the Phi-4 achieves 64%. Yes, not exactly the same, but still damn close.

I suggest to read the paper for everyone looking into possibilities of using these models on their own.

The last few months took a lot of my energy to transit from administrative duties to more research oriented ones. Although I like blogging a lot, there was simply no time left for that. Well, I did write and there will be a new book coming out soon, so here is a preview of what the book will be about.

Not only, this presentation shows how well we managed to develop a tool that helps one of the Software Center companies to keep market leadership in the standardizaiton and requirements.

Enjoy!

A bit of a different blog post today. I’ve just finished a course that I teach to 2nd year undergraduate students – embedded and real-time software systems. I love to see how my students grow from not knowing anything about C to programming embedded systems with interrupts, serial communication between two Arduinos and using preprocessor to implement advanced variability.

In this blog post, however, I want to write a bit about the future of software engineering as I see it. Everyone talks about AI and how it will take our jobs and reduce the need for software engineers. It will, no doubt about that. What it will not do is take the jobs of the BEST programmers on the market. If you are a great designer and software engineer, you will be even better, you will take jobs from everyone else.

This will happen only if we engage in competition. We cannot just rely on ChatGPT, DeepSeek or Manus to write our software and texts. We need to be the best programmers with these tools – faster than anyone else, more secure than anyone else and more innovative than anyone else. That means that we need to get closer to our customers. We need to understand them better than they understand themselves, and we need to do it in the ethical way – we cannot treat our customers as products, we need to treat them as people.

The same goes to our stakeholders. In my course, my stakeholders are my head of department, my dean, my boss and my students. The students are the most important ones. I am here to help them to grow, and I am priviledged when they come to my lectures, but I cannot force them. I need to make sure that I enrich their days, that they feel that my lectures are worth their while. I hope that I deliver, I see that most of them come to the lectures, most of them are happy.

We must engage in competition a bit more – the best ones must feel that they have deserved it. Otherwise, what’s the point of being the best if everyone else is also the best?