Software Engineering Automation: From early tools to Generative AI and beyond

The emergence of Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, promises to disrupt knowledge-based work, including software development. However, these are not the first tools to support the automation of software engineering. From the early days, various tools have been developed to remove repetitive tasks, reduce workload, and consequently increase the abstraction of software development, such as auto-completion and automatic refactoring. In this talk, we present the different levels of the automation of software engineering. We will examine how past and present tools have achieved these levels, the current capabilities of Generative AI tools, and what we can expect for the future.