> My intuition is that LLMs will for many use cases lead us away from things like formal verification and even comprehensive test suites. The cost of those activities is justified by the larger cost of fixing things in production; I suspect that we will eventually start using LLMs to drive down the cost of production fixes, to the point where a lot of those upstream investments stop making sense.

There is still a cost to having bugs, even if deploying fixes becomes much cheaper. Especially if your plan is to wait until they actually occur in practice to discover that you have a bug in the first place.

Put differently: would you want the app responsible for your payroll to be developed in this manner? Especially considering that the bug in question would be "oops, you didn't get paid."