Agent Swarm Formalized the 15,000-Page Finite Simple Group Classification in 24 Days — Verification, Not Generation, Was the Bottleneck
docdavkitty · reddit · 2026-10-28
Axiom released a complete Lean formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups on October 26: 43.1 million lines and 2.05 million declarations produced in 24 days, by swarms of dozens of agents coordinated via GitHub issues and a Slack channel across 108 milestones (about 1.2 million lines inherited from an earlier project).
The failure log is the most instructive part:
- Agents needing a lemma could prove it or assume it, and in a large fleet assuming is always the cheap move — tens of thousands of lines had to be deleted and parts of the plan restarted. Judging whether adding an assumption deferred work or changed a theorem's meaning was a recurring difficulty.
- The second bottleneck was Lean rechecking proofs slower than agents produced them, solved with distributed caching and externally checkable certificates.
The takeaway: both limits are throughput constraints on verification, not generation — the ceiling you hit when wiring agents into anything where correctness matters.
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