The Shape of Code

Unrelenting talk of LLMs now infests all the software ecosystems I frequent.

• Almost all the papers published (week) daily on the Software Engineering arXiv have an LLM themed title. Way back when I read these LLM papers, they seemed to be more concerned with doing interesting things with LLMs than doing software engineering research.
• Predictions of the arrival of AGI are shifting further into the future. Which is not difficult given that a few years ago, people were predicting it would arrive within 6-months. Small percentage improvements in benchmark scores are trumpeted by all and sundry.
• Towards the end of the year, articles explaining AI’s bubble economics, OpenAI’s high rate of loosing money, and the convoluted accounting used to fund some data centers, started appearing.

  Coding assistants might be great for developer productivity, but for Cursor/Claude/etc to be profitable, a significant cost increase is needed.

  Will coding assistant companies run out of money to lose before their customers become so dependent on them, that they have no choice but to pay much higher prices?

With predictions of AGI receding into the future, a new grandiose idea is needed to fill the void. Near the end of the year, we got to hear people who must know it’s nonsense claiming that data centers in space would be happening real soon now.

I attend one or two, occasionally three, evening meetups per week in London. Women used to be uncommon at technical meetups. This year, groups of 2–4 women have become common in meetings of 20+ people (perhaps 30% of attendees); men usually arrive individually. Almost all women I talked to were (ex) students looking for a job; this was also true of the younger (early 20s) men I spoke to. I don’t know if attending meetups been added to the list of things to do to try and find a job.

Tom Plum passed away at the start of the year. Tom was a softly spoken gentleman whose company, PlumHall, sold a C, and then C++, compiler validation suite. Tom lived on Hawaii, and the C/C++ Standard committees were always happy to accept his invitation to host an ISO meeting. The assets of PlumHall have been acquired by Solid Sands.

Perennial was the other major provider of C/C++ validation suites. It’s owner, Barry Headquist, is now enjoying his retirement in Florida.

The evidence-based software engineering Discord channel continues to tick over (invitation), with sporadic interesting exchanges.

What did I learn/discover about software engineering this year?

Software reliability research is a bigger mess than I had previously thought.

I now regularly use LLMs to find mathematical solutions to my experimental models of software engineering processes. Most go nowhere, but a few look like they have potential (here and here and here).

Analysis/data in the following blog posts, from the last 12-months, belongs in my book Evidence-Based Software Engineering, in some form or other (2025 was a bumper year):

Naming convergence in a network of pairwise interactions

Lifetime of coding mistakes in the Linux kernel

Decline in downloads of once popular packages

Distribution of method chains in Java and Python

Modeling the distribution of method sizes

Distribution of integer literals in text/speech and source code

Percentage of methods containing no reported faults

Half-life of Open source research software projects

Positive and negative descriptions of numeric data

Impact of developer uncertainty on estimating probabilities

After 55.5 years the Fortran Specialist Group has a new home

When task time measurements are not reported by developers

Evolution has selected humans to prefer adding new features

One code path dominates method execution

Software_Engineering_Practices = Morals+Theology

Long term growth of programming language use

Deciding whether a conclusion is possible or necessary

CPU power consumption and bit-similarity of input

Procedure nesting a once common idiom

Functions reduce the need to remember lots of variables

Remotivating data analysed for another purpose

Half-life of Microsoft products is 7 years

How has the price of a computer changed over time?

Deep dive looking for good enough reliability models

Apollo guidance computer software development process

Example of an initial analysis of some new NASA data

Extracting information from duplicate fault reports

I visited Foyles bookshop on Charing cross road during the week (if you’re ever in London, browsing books in Foyles is a great way to spend an afternoon).

Computer books once occupied almost half a floor, but is now down to five book cases (opposite is statistics occupying one book case, and the rest of mathematics in another bookcase):

Around the corner, Gender Studies and LGBTQ+ occupies seven bookcases (the same as last year, as I recall):