Comment by tombert

Something I just started doing yesterday, and I'm hoping it catches on, is that I've been writing the spec for what I want in TLA+/PlusCal at a pretty high level, and then I tell Codex implement exactly to the spec. I tell it to not deviate from the spec at all, and be as uncreative as possible.

Since it sticks pretty close to the spec and since TLA+ is about modifying state, the code it generates is pretty ugly, but ugly-and-correct code beats beautiful code that's not verified.

It's not perfect; something that naively adheres to a spec is rarely optimized, and I've had to go in and replace stuff with Tokio or Mio or optimize a loop because the resulting code is too slow to be useful, and sometimes the code is just too ugly for me to put up with so I need to rewrite it, but the amount of time to do that is generally considerably lower than if I were doing the translation myself entirely.

The reason I started doing this: the stuff I've been experimenting with lately has been lock-free data structures, and I guess what I am doing is novel enough that Codex does not really appear to generate what I want; it will still use locks and lock files and when I complain it will do the traditional "You're absolutely right", and then proceed to do everything with locks anyway.

In a sense, this is close to the ideal case that I actually wanted: I can focus on the high-level mathey logic while I let my metaphorical AI intern deal with the minutia of actually writing the code. Not that I don't derive any enjoyment out of writing Rust or something, but the code is mostly an implementation detail to me. This way, I'm kind of doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is "formally specify first, write code second".