Comment by teiferer
17 hours ago
It's even conceivable that 2 gets worse with AI: The AI does the proof for them, very convolutedly so, and as long as the proof checker eats it, it goes through. Comes the day when the complexity goes beyond what the AI assistant can handle and it gives up. At that point, the proof codes complexity will for a long time have passed the threshold of being comprehensible for any human and there is no progress possible. Hard stop.
Using a proof language with an SMT solver is basically that: an inexplicable tick that it’s fine, until a small change is needed, the tick is gone, and nothing can say why.
That's basically what sledgehammer (mentioned in the article) boils down to. The Lean folks use some safeguards to avoid issues with that, such as only using their "grind" at the end of a proof, where all the "building blocks" have been added to context.