alt Hacker NewsI agree completely with the author that AI assisted coding pushes the bottleneck to verification of the code.
But you don't really need complete formal verification to get these benefits. TDD gets you a lot of them as well. Perhaps your verification is less certain, but it's much easier to get high automated test coverage than it is to get a formally verifiable codebase.
I think AI assisted coding is going to cause a resurgence of interest in XP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming) since AI is a great fit for two big parts of XP. AI makes it easy to write well-tested code. The "pairing" method of writing code is also a great model for interacting with an AI assistant (much better than the vibe-coding model).
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Mainstream has been slowly adapting xp like last 20 years, devops first and now pair programming with agents and tdd.
Trouble is that TDD, and formal proofs to much the same extent, assume a model of "double entry accounting". Meaning that you write both the test/proof and the implementation, and then make sure they agree. Like in accounting, the assumption is that the probability of you making the same mistake twice is fairly low, giving high confidence to accuracy when they agree. When there is a discrepancy, then you can then unpack if the problem is in the test/proof or the implementation. The fallible human can easily screw either.
But if you only fill out one side of the ledger, so to speak, an LLM will happily invent something that ensures that it is balanced, even where your side of the entry is completely wrong. So while this type of development is an improvement over blindly trusting an arbitrary prompt without any checks and balances, it doesn't really get us to truly verifying the code to the same degree we were able to achieve before. This remains an unsolved problem.
There's a pretty fundamental difference: TDD is about avoiding up-front design, while formal specification literally is up-front design.