Deep Dive: Will AI Make Formal Verification Mainstream?
The Pragmatic Engineer · rss · 2026-07-30
The Pragmatic Engineer podcast hosted formal methods expert Hillel Wayne to discuss the role of formal verification in modern software development and the potential impact of AI on the field.
Key Takeaways:
- Value of TLA+: TLA+, created by Leslie Lamport, was used by Amazon AWS to find a highly complex bug with a 35-step shortest reproduction trace, impossible to catch via conventional testing.
- Practical Limitations: Writing real-world specs is notoriously difficult. Even a simple task like 'find the file with the most lines' becomes complex when modeling edge cases like encodings, unreadable files, and symlinks. Thus, it remains a niche tool for less than 1% of exotic cases.
- Impact of AI: Hillel believes AI won't make formal verification fully mainstream, but increasing its adoption from 0.1% to 0.3% would be huge. Interestingly, those who successfully use AI to generate formal specs are usually formal verification experts themselves.
- Career Concerns: Rather than fearing job losses to AI, he worries software engineering will become an "ordinary" job with lower pay and less prestige.
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