Software Reuse in the Generative AI Era: From Cargo Cult Towards AI Native Software Engineering

Software development is currently under a paradigm shift in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) - in particular Generative AI [6] - has taken an increasingly central role in assisting developers in their software creation activities. This is in essence a new form of software reuse in which collections of previously created software artifacts form the basis for generating new ones. Unlike in the past when developers were manually searching for pre-existing software components from libraries and code repositories such as Github, Node Package Manager (NPM) or the Python Package Index (PyPI), in the new model developers are requesting AI-driven assistants to generate suitable pieces of code for them. These generated artifacts can range from small code snippets and module fragments to comprehensive application skeletons or in some cases fully functional applications or even complete end-to-end systems. This new generative approach to software reuse has resulted in a considerable mental model change for developers.