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Engineering & computing · OECD FoS 1.2 · China MoE 0835 软件工程

Software engineering

软件工程

L3Systemic transformation ↑ Rising ↓ from L4 Score 3.10 · Last reviewed 2026-10-21 · Next review 2026-12-20

BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGH 2021-07-07 AI · majorField · major

Codex and HumanEval: evaluating LLMs trained on code ↗

Origin of code LLMs and Copilot

Why this level

Lowered to L3: adoption is the highest of any field (Stack Overflow 2026: over 70% of respondents use AI daily), but Google’s ~75% and Anthropic’s 90%+ code shares are vendor claims and cannot alone justify L4. METR’s RCT found experienced OSS developers 19% slower in early 2025; 2026 follow-ups estimate speed-ups but with design limits, so independent productivity evidence is mixed.

↓ L4 → L3

Research method 4Scientific discovery 2Practitioner adoption 4Education & curriculum 2
Research method ×0.34/4

Coding agents are a mainstream software-development tool · source ↗

Scientific discovery ×0.352/4

Benchmarks such as SWE-bench are improving fast, but independent randomised trials disagree on productivity (METR 2025 found experienced developers 19% slower) · source ↗

Practitioner adoption ×0.254/4

Independent Stack Overflow 2026 survey (30,000+ respondents): over 70% use AI daily, 31% for 4+ hours a day; coding agents are the top use (66%) · source ↗

Education & curriculum ×0.12/4

Programming education has widely adjusted, but there is no systematic data

S = 0.30·method + 0.35·discovery + 0.25·adoption + 0.10·education (education scores 0 when there is no evidence; if empty, the other weights are renormalised)

Sources

Composite 2.5–3.49 (or ≥3.5 with any of method/discovery/adoption below 3): AI is standard infrastructure with multiple independent breakthroughs. All levels →

Research directions

Coding agentsAutomated repair & testingCode reviewSpec-to-deploy automation

Papers

Milestones 10

Big glowing nodes are leaps: AI leap cool · Field leap warm · double ring = both

  1. Industry

    Anthropic: 90%+ of its code written by Claude

    Vendor claim: 90%+ of code written by Claude

    TechSpotVendor claim
  2. Industry

    Google: ~75% of new code is AI-generated

    Vendor claim: ~75% of new code AI-generated

    The VergeVendor claim
  3. Paper

    METR update: late-2025 follow-up estimates 4–18% speed-ups, CIs span zero; design to change

    Shows how hard independent productivity measurement remains

    METR
  4. Paper

    METR RCT: early-2025 AI made experienced OSS developers 19% slower

    Developers believed +20% but measured −19%

    arXivPreprint
  5. Benchmark

    SWE-bench: resolving real GitHub issues (ICLR 2024)

    Real-repo issue benchmark; main yardstick for coding agents

    arXivPreprint
  6. Paper

    Copilot RCT: developers finish a task 55.8% faster

    Early productivity evidence on a simple task

    arXivPreprint
  7. Competition

    AlphaCode: competition-level code generation (Science)

    First median-human level in programming contests

    Science
  8. Benchmark ⓘ note

    Codex and HumanEval: evaluating LLMs trained on code

    Origin of code LLMs and Copilot

    arXivPreprint
  9. System

    GitHub Copilot technical preview

    First mass-market AI coding assistant

    GitHub Blog
More papers & repos 7

Latest news 12

Data updated: AI × disciplines(UTC+8)