Kasper Østerbye will give a talk about using AI and LLMs in the Pharo programming environment.
SPEAKER: Kasper Østerbye, former associate professor at ITU.
TITLE: Using AI to Enhance the Pharo Development Environment: A Conversational Approach to Code Generation
ABSTRACT: He helped shape the ITU in its early years, teaching generations of students before leaving academia in 2015. A brain cancer diagnosis in 2022 paused everything, then reset his path. With the help of AI and text-to-speech tools, he made his return to programming.
Today, he works in Pharo, a live, object-oriented programming environment where the language, IDE, and runtime are a unified system. His current focus is on a new, playful, and conversational approach to code generation, integrating AI into the heart of the development loop.
The talk will explore how AI models, like those we’ve experimented with, can be used to generate robust class comments and test cases in a live Pharo environment. We will demonstrate how a simple set of instructions can be used to guide an AI to write precise documentation and generate tests based on class definitions, ensuring that the generated code is both idiomatic and semantically correct.
This presentation will argue for a shift in the programming paradigm, from direct coding to a more conversational and collaborative process with AI. It will show how this approach can improve developer workflow, code quality, and the overall joy of programming.