Hillel Wayne: TLA+ is great, but 'formal methods will save AI' hype misses what it can't even express
leland_mcinnes · x · 2026-09-30
Responding to the hype after Claude Code creator Boris Cherny said Opus used TLA+ to find race conditions, Hillel Wayne published a level-headed post on what TLA+ can and can't check.
- TLA+ excels at designing complex concurrent systems, but correct designs don't automatically translate into correct code.
- The core limitation: to verify a property, you need a property to express. Wayne focuses on properties TLA+ cannot even represent.
- He walks through TLA+'s model of behaviors as state sequences and temporal operators []P (always), P' (next state), and <>P (eventually).
- Verdict: claims that formal methods will solve agentic software development once and for all are nonsense.
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