The Soul of an Old Machine

Over the past few years I have been contributing occasional articles and columns to SIGSOFT SEN but have stopped for the past two from writer's block. In that gap there has been fundamental though unrelated changes in US funding of science (which impacts software engineering staff) and in the practice of software engineering itself. The first refers to the significant cuts in government funding of grants in science along with increased restrictions on and cancellations of foreign student visas. The second is the forced use of AI-based tools into the software development process. The first part of this column will address the first change, and the second part will address the second.