alt Hacker NewsYes I think fundamentally the effort required to understand, write, and verify a formal specification is just way higher than is reasonable in most situations.
There are some cases where it is pleasingly simple - usually low level algorithms like compression, sorting, search etc. Basically things you'd find in leetcode questions.
Most software isn't like that.
I think the actual answer is just that the very latest models (e.g. Astra) are actually quite good at writing normal tests, and you can just skim them to make sure they're doing something sane.
Narrowly, I think you're spot on. The effort required to understand the machinery around formal verification is a function of the surface area of the thing being formally verified. Specifically, formally verifying the surface area of general purpose programming languages is difficult.
My approach with Hale (shameless self plug) is that the programming language itself first offers another strata of structure to program within, a type of graph. Once the structure of the program is expressed as a graph, understanding how formal verification works is a clean encapsulation of graph activities.