How to Automate Software Engineering

How to fully automate software engineering Ege Erdil, Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu May 30, 2025 With every passing month, AI models get better at most tasks that a software engineer does in their job. Yet for all these gains, today’s models only assist human engineers, falling far short of automating their job completely. What will it take to build AIs that can fully replace software engineers, and why aren’t we there yet? Current AIs present something of a paradox. Their performance on narrow coding tasks already exceeds that of most human software engineers. However, any engineer who has worked with them quickly notices the need to keep AI agents such as Claude Code on a very short leash. Despite good benchmark scores and impressive demos, there are clearly core capabilities that human engineers have that our current systems are missing. We’ve previously highlighted some of these shortcomings: lack of reliability, poor long context performance, and overly narrow agentic capa ... Read full article.