Keynote Speaker

Leonardo Mariani

University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Getting the Right System vs Getting the System Right: My Experience With Project-Scale Gen AI

Software development is being reshaped by agentic systems, which aim to accelerate application development through LLM-based agents capable of assisting developers throughout the development process. While their effectiveness in small, localized generation tasks is well established, automated code generation at full project scale remains a challenging scenario. This talk presents results and insights from a set of experiments on repository-scale code generation with agentic systems, highlighting both what these systems currently excel at and where they struggle. Particular attention is given to the distinction between obtaining the right system and obtaining any working system, illustrating how agentic approaches behave with respect to these two objectives.

Short Bio

Leonardo Mariani is a Full Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, received from the same university. His research interests include software engineering, in particular software testing, program analysis, automated debugging, AI4SE, and self-adaptive systems. He has authored more than 200 papers appeared at top software engineering conferences and journals. He received the ICST MIP award for his ICST 2013 paper. He was awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2015, an ERC Proof of Concept grant in 2018. He is regularly involved in the organization of major software engineering conferences.