Opening Keynote Eric Evans

For ten years, DDD Europe has been a center of our exchange of ideas, techniques and connections. It has been vital to this community's ability to navigate change. And there has been change. The software development industry, team processes and the technology have all changed, and we've adapted DDD principles with new practices. AI technology is now bringing a massive wave of change, and I believe we'll need this forum even more, to grapple with it together.

Will AI amplify DDD or replace it? We can't know that now; the coming years will tell. With imperfect knowledge, what can we do to adapt, as individuals and as a community? I'll share my own answer. My working hypothesis: domain models still matter, bounded contexts still matter, language still matters -- but the models will look different.

To make it tangible, I'll share an experiment of mine that uses LLM components and deterministic calculations to extract domain-relative vocabulary from code and compare it. I imagine it might give us a more objective, quantitative way to look at bounded contexts and relationships. It is an idea I tried years ago, but it wasn't feasible until we had software that could interpret word usage. (I expect this all will seem like baby steps in a few years.)

My concept of DDD points me to another area of study: We don't like black boxes. Understanding the math of a transformer or the training objective develops intuition for using them and ages better than the latest prompting trick. More specifically relevant to DDD, LLMs do have conceptual models in them -- complex, stochastic and tangled. My working hypothesis is that understanding what's happening in there may turn out to be essential for the deep-domain problems where DDD has always mattered most. This will be an overview of my own learning. (Kept brief, for time. Likewise I'll leave out the whole topic of coding agents, where others have more interesting things to say.)

Finally: the fear and dread for our whole society. There is risk in such an enormous change, happening so fast and with such recklessness. Who knows. Maybe this current approach to AI will reach a plateau soon. I might honestly hope for that. Society would have a chance to assimilate what we have now, and there would be so much interesting work for us to do. However, my preferences (or yours) don't have much effect on what will actually happen. What little influence we have will come from engaging in the unfolding of its possibilities, and this likely also gives us our best chance to thrive. Diving deep into these matters may produce valuable results and resilience. It will surely be intellectually fascinating.