In a keynote presentation at the 2026 Mining Software Repositories Emerson Murphy-Hill, a star researcher at Microsoft, presented his view on the role of an empirical software engineering researcher in the age of generative AI. His talk focused on three themes: the durability, differentiation, and dissemination of research.
Continue reading "Empirical software research in the age of AI"We are living through a golden age of generative AI: a time when progress is both breathtaking and somehow still unable to reliably open a PDF without hallucinating the author’s middle name. The curve is real, the funding is real, and the demos are so real that they must be watched on a stage with dramatic lighting, because ordinary lighting reveals too much. The modern model does many things remarkably well—summarization, translation, code generation—and then it will confidently assert that 9 is a prime number “depending on your threat model,” which is how you know you’re witnessing history.
Continue reading "Vibe coding toward the incident horizon"
Last update: Monday, April 13, 2026 5:06 pm
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
