Test, don't just verify

kept by eddie dec 24, 25

Testing is argued to be more practical than formal verification, but commenters are divided on AI’s role in making verification mainstream.

When the Hard Part Stops Being Hard
Using an LLM to mechanize proofs in Lean cut months of work to weeks, showing that PL research can now be produced far faster, reshaping publication expectations.
also on CompCert, Lean, #programming-languages, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Formal verification will become mainstream as AI coding agents leverage proof systems like Lean for validation, according to a Hacker News discussion.
also on Lean, #rust, #programming-languages, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Don't waste your back pressure ·
Providing AI agents with automated feedback loops (back pressure) enables them to self-correct on long-horizon tasks, increasing engineer leverage.
also on Lean, #rust, #programming-languages, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
Dan Luu's empirical tests with LLMs on Zstd and Pandoc implementations show that language popularity weakly correlates with better outcomes, but claims about dynamic or token-efficient languages being superior for coding agents do not hold across non-trivial tasks.
also on #rust, #programming-languages, #ai-coding, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Fable one-shotted a Rust rewrite of the TerminalTextEffects Python library in 11M tokens. Startup time went from 87ms to 2ms and rendering s
Fable rewrote the TerminalTextEffects Python library in Rust using 11M tokens, reducing startup time from 87ms to 2ms and boosting rendering speed 9.6x with zero dependencies in a 3MB executable.
also on #rust, #programming-languages, #ai-coding, #developer-tools