A core principle of object orientation -- that the functionality of a system can be partitioned amongst objects that correspond to individuals in the problem domain -- has influenced how software has been specified, designed and implemented for more than fifty years. Later developments in software engineering sought to build on this principle. But in fact this partitioning is neither natural nor straightforward, and the problems that these later developments sought to mitigate -- the fragmentation and conflation of functionality -- were often, in fact, the inevitable consequences of this founding principle. An easier path to addressing these problems therefore starts by going back, abandoning object orientation, and replacing it with an alternative approach that decouples the individuals of the problem domain from the modules that partition functionality.
Cyber-physical systems built on deterministic edge inference, such as on-vehicle flood detection for agricultural fields, produce structured decision logs that must be interpreted differently by heterogeneous stakeholders. Pairing such systems with large language models (LLMs) to…
Large language model (LLM) code explanations can support people in solving code-related problems, yet prior work has shown that people have diverse problem-solving styles. If explanations fail to meet people's problem-solving needs, they may be less productive in their occupation…
Interactive theorem proving (ITP) underpins program verification and formalized mathematics, but its manual effort limits scalability. LLM-based proof agents promise to ease this effort, but their heavy token consumption and API cost remain a major obstacle. We trace this cost to…
AI coding agents set up projects by reading documentation and installing the dependencies it lists, without verifying their names, sources, or known vulnerabilities. By editing only a README, requirements file, or Makefile, an attacker can redirect the agent to an untrusted regis…
Agentic computer-use RL is reported in single runs, and those numbers mislead. Using verifier-guided repair of a 35B computer-use agent (CUA) across five oracle-graded environments, we show a repaired policy's success rate is dominated by upstream variance: a variance-components…
The growing adoption of local inference frameworks such as Ollama has made it increasingly common for developers to run large code models on laptops and other resource-constrained hardware. In these settings, post-training quantization is essential for reducing memory footprint a…