Wyatt Benno(@wyatt_benno):Great piece. The thesis is right, formal verification is finally practical thanks to AI! One gap: Lean requires proof experts, relies on interactive proving, and produces non-succinct proofs. SMT-based verification (Dafny, ICME PreFlight, etc) automates the proof step entirely. More importantly, you can translate natural language intent directly into formal specs via automated reasoning. No tactics, no proof engineering. Some systems hit 99% and climbing with minimal human battle testing. We call this vericoding. Same goal, different tooling. And you can wrap the entire pipeline in ZK so every verification result is succinctly verifiable. Wrote about it here:

2026.05.18 15:48

Great piece. The thesis is right, formal verification is finally practical thanks to AI! One gap: Lean requires proof experts, relies on interactive proving, and produces non-succinct proofs. SMT-based verification (Dafny, ICME PreFlight, etc) automates the proof step entirely. More importantly, you can translate natural language intent directly into formal specs via automated reasoning. No tactics, no proof engineering. Some systems hit 99% and climbing with minimal human battle testing. We call this vericoding. Same goal, different tooling. And you can wrap the entire pipeline in ZK so every verification result is succinctly verifiable. Wrote about it here:

vitalik.eth@VitalikButerin

2026.05.18 12:40

Many people have claimed that with AI-assisted bug finding, secure code (and hence trustless anything) will be impossible. I have a much more optimistic take, and AI-assisted formal verification is a major part of the reason why: