Rethinking Software Engineering in the Foundation Model Era: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware

Understand

Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models.

• We refer to software built using FMs as FMware.
• The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents, and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges.
• Based on our industrial experience, we identified 10 key SE4FMware challenges that have caused enterprise FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky.