Ulrich Junker: “Imho, software engineering gets worse in each decade. Initially, computers were programmed by punch cards and programmers needed to execute their programs on paper to anticipate issues. This was tedious, but very instructive.

Next came PCs with compilers. People could quickly try out their programs. Execution on paper was replaced by the debugger. Interestingly, bug databases started to pop up in this phase. Software companies openly admitted that they shipped buggy software.

Then came open software, IDEs, frequent releases. Many programmers are simply stitching code fragments together and then walk through a debugger to understand the behavior. Bugs were considered inevitable and many bug reports simply constituted requests for feature refinements as most software lacks a clear specification of its behavior.

Now we are getting LLMs for code generation … let us see which kind of software we are getting thanks to them …” Link