Formal methods with Hillel Wayne

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There’s a popular theory that AI will finally make formal verification mainstream because mathematical proof of correctness will be needed when machines write most or all of the code. But will this happen? Today, I’m talking with one of the best people to tackle the prediction. Hillel Wayne is a formal methods consultant, educator, and author, who’s deeply interested in software history. 

In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with Hillel to compare software engineering with traditional engineering, discuss where formal methods fit into modern software development, and we explore why they are essential for some of the world's most complex systems. We cover the formal specification language, TLA+, walk through several formal verification tools, examine why distributed systems are so difficult to reason about, and look into whether AI will make formal methods accessible to more engineering teams.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:21 The Crossover Project

10:26 What software engineering does better

14:19 What traditional engineering does better

17:06 Formal methods

28:21 TLA+: what it is and demo

35:47 TLA+ at Amazon

36:59 Ways distributed systems break

39:52 Formal methods and systems thinking

45:09 The value of learning math

49:12 What TLA+ is good for and isn’t

51:39 Alloy: a declarative language for software modeling

57:42 Other formal methods tools

1:00:13 Property-based testing

1:04:20 AI and the need for formal verification

1:11:18 Logic for programmers

1:13:24 Hillel’s 2025 prediction on AI’s impact

1:20:19 Book recommendation

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis

• How AWS S3 is built

• Paying down tech debt

• How Big Tech does quality assurance (QA)

• Bug management that works

• Resiliency in distributed systems

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