The gap between "what software actually does" and "what users believe it does" — this paper tackles that root problem with one unifying measure: explicit meaning 📐 Title: Making Software Meaningful URL: 📐 Overview The paper advocates adopting "explicit meaning" as a unifying measure to improve software usability, modularity, and accountability. It describes software behavior as a shared representation grounded in domain-specific language, not technical jargon. ❓ Challenges Solved Software engineering has a fundamental gap. ・"What the software actually does" diverges from "what users believe it does" ・That divergence breeds poor usability, bugs, and distrust The thesis: quality improves when developers and users hold a single, explicit understanding of what the software does and why. 💡 Methodology & Proposed Approach It organizes domain-specific phenomena (individuals, actions, and resulting facts) into concepts as a shared vocabulary, shown through three applications. ・Usability design: align user and designer perspectives via shared meaning ・Modular code generation: use LLMs to map conceptual units of meaning to code units, boosting modularity and legibility ・Agent accountability: implement codes of conduct based on explicitly defined intended behaviors 🌍 Use Cases It applies to improving modularity and legibility in LLM-assisted development, and to AI governance by making an autonomous agent's intended behavior explicit and accountable. It argues for putting "meaning" at the center as humans and AI build software together. #SoftwareEngineering# #AIGovernance#