’25, October 12–18, 2025, Singapore, Singapore
Eagon Meng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, USA, <eagon@mit.edu>
Daniel Jackson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, USA, <dnj@mit.edu>
Abstract [v2 27 august 2025]
The opportunities offered by LLM coders (and their current limitations) demand a reevaluation of how software is structured. Software today is often “illegible” —lacking a direct correspondence between code and observed behavior— and insufficiently modular, leading to a failure of three key requirements of robust coding:
incrementality (the ability to deliver small increments by making localized changes),
integrity (avoiding breaking prior increments) and
transparency (making clear what has changed at build time, and
what actions have happened at runtime).
A new structural pattern offers improved legibility and
modularity. Its elements are concepts and synchronizations:
fully independent services and event-based rules that mediate between them. A domain-specific language for synchronizations allows behavioral features to be expressed in a granular and declarative way (and thus readily generated by an LLM).
A case study of the RealWorld benchmark is used to illustrate and evaluate the approach.
CCS Concepts:
• Software and its engineering →event-based architectures;
• Cooperating communicating processes;
• Abstraction, modeling and modularity;
• Organizing principles for web applications;
• Runtime environments;
• Source code generation;
• Specification languages;
• Orchestration languages.
based2•1h ago
Abstract [v2 27 august 2025]
The opportunities offered by LLM coders (and their current limitations) demand a reevaluation of how software is structured. Software today is often “illegible” —lacking a direct correspondence between code and observed behavior— and insufficiently modular, leading to a failure of three key requirements of robust coding: incrementality (the ability to deliver small increments by making localized changes), integrity (avoiding breaking prior increments) and transparency (making clear what has changed at build time, and what actions have happened at runtime). A new structural pattern offers improved legibility and modularity. Its elements are concepts and synchronizations: fully independent services and event-based rules that mediate between them. A domain-specific language for synchronizations allows behavioral features to be expressed in a granular and declarative way (and thus readily generated by an LLM). A case study of the RealWorld benchmark is used to illustrate and evaluate the approach.
CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering →event-based architectures; • Cooperating communicating processes; • Abstraction, modeling and modularity; • Organizing principles for web applications; • Runtime environments; • Source code generation; • Specification languages; • Orchestration languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3BESrECaIo Audio only
src: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/researchers_detail_le...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
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