Emery Berger, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amazon Web Services
Large language models are achieving state-of-the-art results across a wide variety of domains, eclipsing past work in well-studied areas like auto-completion. I argue that they also presage a "Cambrian explosion"—a wave of radically new AI-powered software development tools that will make all our lives easier. I propose a paradigm for how we can best rethink existing tools to leverage a combination of LLMs and PL technologies like static and dynamic analysis. This approach promises to evolve our software tools far beyond their current capacities, including profilers that suggest optimizations, debuggers that identify and propose fixes using real-world knowledge, coverage analyzers that synthesize new tests, compilers that propose fixes for compile-time errors, and data analysis frameworks that analyze your data.
Emery Berger is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system, and an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services. At UMass, Professor Berger leads the PLASMA lab, whose research has led to numerous impactful software systems (see https://github.com/plasma-umass). Professor Berger is also the developer and sole maintainer of the influential CSrankings.org site, which has served over 3 million users. He served six years as an elected member of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee and a decade as Associate Editor of TOPLAS; he served as Program Chair for PLDI 2016 and co-Program Chair of ASPLOS 2021, and received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award in 2024. His honors include an NSF CAREER Award, Most Influential Paper Awards at OOPSLA, PLDI, and ASPLOS, five CACM Research Highlights, and Best Paper Awards at FAST, OOPSLA, SOSP, and OSDI; he is an ACM Fellow.
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author = {Emery Berger},
title = {Accelerating Software Development: The {LLM} (R)evolution},
year = {2025},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}