The growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Software Engineering has reinforced the expectation that coding activities can be largely automated. However, this perception may represent yet another historical search for a solution capable of eliminating the inherent challenges of software development. This article discusses the transition from a code-centered paradigm to Specification-Driven Development. We argue that artificial intelligence reduces some of the effort associated with writing source code, but it does not eliminate the complexity of developing professional software systems. Instead, it shifts this complexity toward domain understanding, requirements elicitation, specification development, validation, maintenance, and software evolution. Building on this perspective, we discuss the renewed centrality of Requirements Engineering, considering its implications for productivity and software quality, as well as risks associated with automation bias, ambiguity propagation, Specification Overfitting, and the accumulation of Specification Debt. Finally, we propose the Specification Paradox: the more capable artificial intelligence systems become at automatically generating software, the greater the dependence on correct, complete, verifiable, and explainable human-produced specifications. We conclude that the future of Software Engineering will depend not only on machines'ability to generate code, but also on humans'ability to correctly specify, evaluate, and evolve what is intended to be built.
Enterprise software requires specification governance to transform probabilistic AI generation into deterministic, auditable engineering, and the SGRM framework is introduced, which defines four-component specification contracts, constrains stochastic generation via deterministic validation, and integrates generation, verification, and governance into a closed-loop architecture.
The use of large language models (LLMs) is being introduced into requirements, code generation, testing, maintenance, and documentation processes, but most IT organizations have yet to establish a practical and evidence-based methodology regarding when these tools are value added, when they become risky, and how to regulate their usage. The article is a synthesis of recent empirical research, surveys of developers, and guidance on the use of LLMs in software engineering and translates that information into a playbook of guidance that can be applied by practitioners. The primary contribution of the article is a staged adoption framework, which includes explore, pilot, and scale, supported with lightweight survey templates, small-task assessment designs, and accept/edit/reject logging practices that organizations can adopt to produce their own context-specific evidence. The objective is to facilitate disciplined, open-minded adoption of LLMs in actual software engineering environments.
GUI agents have advanced rapidly, producing a growing body of frameworks, benchmarks, and applications. However, this growth has outpaced the maturity of the field. GUI agents remain technically brittle, incompletely engineered, and insufficiently validated for sustained real-world use. They are evolving into closed-loop software systems. Within these systems, model reasoning is coupled with interface perception, execution feedback, recovery, and human oversight. This evolution calls for a software engineering perspective that remains largely absent from existing research. We address this gap by reviewing 336 GUI-agent papers from January 2018 to April 2026. Five research questions examine the research landscape, architectures, evaluation, software lifecycle concerns, and future opportunities. Our findings show that the field has expanded sharply since 2024, while mobile and web settings remain dominant. Architectures increasingly adopt modular perceive-reason-act loops, but recovery, human escalation, safety enforcement, and auditability remain underdeveloped. This architectural imbalance extends to evaluation. Evaluations are becoming more interactive, but they remain centered on task success and are difficult to compare across protocols. More broadly, existing studies provide limited support for testing beyond benchmarks and for maintaining agents after release. Observability, privacy engineering, and systematic human oversight are also underdeveloped. Together, these findings show that capability improvements alone cannot ensure deployment readiness. Future research should connect dependable execution with lifecycle-centered testing and reproducible evaluation. It should also integrate permission and privacy controls with cost-aware, human-centered governance. This integration is necessary to build dependable, maintainable, secure, and deployable GUI-agent systems.
Shengcheng Yu, Yuchen Ling, Junyang Xing et al.· 0 citations
Over the past months, the way developers direct agentic AI coding tools has moved up several levels of abstraction, from phrasing prompts to engineering context to configuring the harness around the model. In June 2026, practitioners began to describe a further level called loop engineering: Instead of prompting an agent interactively, developers design systems that prompt agents for them. These systems start agent runs on a schedule or on repository events and stop them when a machine-checkable condition holds. The term spread rapidly, accompanied by bold claims and vocal skepticism, but its adoption in software projects has not been measured. We present an exploratory review of the emerging gray literature, which largely agrees on what a well-engineered loop contains: triggered agent runs bounded by machine-checkable stop conditions, persistent state files, verifier sub-agents, token budgets, and defined points of escalation to humans. From this review, we derive a research agenda for the empirical study of loop engineering in open-source projects, analyze which of its aspects are traceable from repository data, and report an exploratory mining study of 36,710 software repositories. We confirmed the operation of autonomous agent loops in 217 of the 256 repositories our heuristics matched. The repositories commit the configuration around these loops, but almost none commits the state files the discourse prescribes, and the loops'runtime state remains outside version control. We conclude by outlining a planned controlled study of agent autonomy levels and their effect on effort and outcomes.
Jai Lal Lulla, Vahram Nersesyan, Seyedmoein Mohsenimofidi et al.· 0 citations
Overall, this survey provides a structured characterization of the current state of AIware testing research and identifies key structural challenges that must be addressed to support lifecycle-aware, reliable AIware systems.
K. Gonzalez, Mariam El Mezouar· AIware· 0 citations