The arrival of language models like GPT-4 is a mass extinction event for entire lines of research in PL and SE, achieving state of the art results in a wide variety of areas. It also (I hope) presages a Cambrian explosion that will lead to a range of radically new kinds of functionality within our software development tools. I will talk about a suite of current projects from my group that illustrate some of these possibilities. They integrate or cooperate with existing software development tools to provide useful new features: a database manager that allows arbitrary natural language queries (SQLwrite), a profiler that proposes performance and memory optimizations (Scalene), debuggers that provide root cause analysis and proposed fixes (ChatDBG), and a compiler wrapper that converts C/C++/Rust compiler errors into natural language and proposes fixes (CWhy).

Emery Berger is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of the UMass system. See his home page for more information.