Reverse and forward engineering with AI

Birgitta Böckeler explaining how AI has changed reverse and forward engineering.

I say AI-accelerated reverse engineering and then AI-accelerated forward engineering, where the reverse engineering only includes a description of the application, not actually building it, so the forensics kind of. You do forensics on the existing application and the existing code to recreate a good description of what it does. Because we can now use generative AI in the forward engineering, there’s a new incentive for us to actually create this description in textual form in a lot of detail.

In the past, maybe we wouldn’t even do it at that level of detail. We would still, in the forward engineering, maybe have stories as the placeholder for a conversation because we want to build a new, fresh application. Now that we can use AI for the forward engineering, there is an incentive there to have very detailed descriptions. It maybe even changes the equation of cost benefit when we think about feature parity. That’s also one of the hypotheses. That with AI-accelerated reverse and forward engineering, feature parity might become less of a sticking point.