The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later
Formal software verification is seeing a resurgence in interest driven by the rise of AI-generated code, which necessitates new methods for ensuring software correctness. While historically considered impractical, the speed of AI development is forcing a re-evaluation of these traditional methods.
Why it matters
As AI becomes a primary driver of software development, the industry must solve the 'correctness' problem to ensure reliability in critical systems.
Engineers are getting excited about software verification! This may come as a surprise, since verification has long been considered useful only in very niche cases (at best; and impractical, useless or a complete waste of time at worst). Yet, the hype around it is clearly here: Google Trends shows a large spike in searches for formal verification/formal methods in the last two years, everybody’s learning Lean, new specification languages are popping up regularly, and there are efforts to verify major applications end-to-end (e.g., the Signal Shot project).
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