Comment by ogogmad

The existence of seL4 and its ability to be used in real projects certainly proves that formal methods has been effectively used to improve safety and security in shipping products, which was the question you asked if I understood it correctly...

> while the AIs are eliminating programming as a field altogether.

Where? So far, GPT-4 gets confused when given a specification with more than a dozen logic variables, and confidently regurgitates things that are, best case, partially working, and worst case, completely broken, based on a generative model trained on Stack Overflow and other forums. It's a cute concept, but it's closer to Eliza than eliminating this field. I can give it a logic problem that a freshman CS student can solve, and it will confidently give me the wrong answer. While I'm sure that LLMs will get better over time, I personally think their current application in software development has been over-hyped. There are plenty of papers, including the (in)famous "Stochastic Parrots" paper that are quite scathing. Based on my own tire kicking experience, I'm not convinced that LLMs can replace much more than boilerplate programming unless there are significant breakthroughs well beyond the current state of the art. Not incremental changes, but a complete reinvention of the current science.

You can be skeptical regarding formal methods, but I use formal methods daily. It adds roughly 25% overhead over just unit testing to model check software, which easily covers 95% of the code base. The important parts -- enforcing function contracts, data flow, resource management, and correct usage patterns for things like cryptographic primitives -- are actually quite trivial to implement using an SMT solver. There is difficulty when dealing with loops, recursion, data structures, and algorithms, but most code out there can be abstracted away from these concepts. Contract enforcement at the library and framework level are certainly possible using tools as they exist today.