PoudlardoLeanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering
Lean 4 paper (2021): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-79876-5_37
It’s great to see this pattern of people realising that agents can specify the desired behavior then write code to conform to the specs.
TDD, verification, whatever your tool; verification suites of all sorts accrue over time into a very detailed repository of documentation of how things are supposed to work that, being executable, puts zero tokens in the context when the code is correct.
It’s more powerful than reams upon reams of markdown specs. That’s because it encodes details, not intent. Your intent is helpful at the leading edge of the process, but the codified result needs shoring up to prevent regression. That’s the area software engineering has always ignored because we have gotten by on letting teams hold context in their heads and docs.
As software gets more complex we need better solutions than “go ask Jim about that, bloke’s been in the code for years”.
Not just TDD. Amazon, for instance, is heading towards something between TDD and lightweight formal methods.
They are embracing property-based specifications and testing à la Haskell's QuickCheck: https://kiro.dev
Then, already in formal methods territory, refinement types (e.g. Dafny, Liquid Haskell) are great and less complex than dependent types (e.g. Lean, Agda).
What about model-driven development? Spec to code was the name of the game for UML.
Setting aside that model means something different now … MDD never really worked because the tooling never really dealt with intent. You would get so far with your specifications (models) but the semantic rigidity of the tooling mean that at some point your solution would have to part way. LLM is the missing piece that finally makes this approach viable where the intent can be inferred dynamically and this guides the
implementation specifics. Arguably the purpose of TDD/BDD was to shore up the gaps in communicating intent, and people came to understand that was its purpose, whereas the key intent in the original XP setting was to capture and preserve “known good” operation and guard against regression (in XP mindset, perhaps fatefully clear intent was assumed)
implementation specifics. Arguably the purpose of TDD/BDD was to shore up the gaps in communicating intent, and people came to understand that was its purpose, whereas the key intent in the original XP setting was to capture and preserve “known good” operation and guard against regression (in XP mindset, perhaps fatefully clear intent was assumed)