Comment by jerf

Just as an addendum to some of the other fine replies you've got, one of the things I'm interested in for formal verification is security assertions, and those don't necessarily need lots of comprehension to apply. If you can assert "this code never hits the network again" or "this code will never execute arbitrary code", the proof of that may be nontrivial but the comprehension of it is easy.

Proving that some complicated algorithm is actually what you think it is, even after you've proved that it does whatever it is it does, is hard. But to me, and me personally so not necessarily what everyone else thinks, that's not really what I'm interested in from proofs. I'm really more interested in these overarching declarations of what the code definitely doesn't do, or putting bounds on what it does, rather than proving that my billing code bills the customers precisely in the way I expect, when, frankly, the best specification of it I have is already what is in the unproved code base anyhow. I believe those have a very sensible story as to how both humans and AIs can use those assertions.