by rramadass | 2025-12-17 06:45:27+00:00
Nope; you are quite wrong here. Most people have no idea of what Formal Specification/Verification via the usage of Formal Methods really means.

It is first and foremost about learning a way of thinking. Tools only exist to augment and systematize this thinking into a methodology. There are different levels of "Formal Methods Thinking" starting with informal all the way to completely rigorous. Understanding and using these methods of thinking as the "interface" to specify a problem to an AI agent/LLM is what is important to ensure "correctness by construction to a specification".

Everybody should read this excellent (and accessible) paper On Formal Methods Thinking in Computer Science Education which details the above approach - https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/on-formal-methods-th...

Excerpts:

One may ask What good is FM? Who needs it? Millions of programmers work everyday without it. Many think that FM in a CS curriculum is peddling the idea that Formal Logic (e.g.,propositional or predicate logic) is required for everyday programmers, that they need it to write programs that are more likely to be correct, and correspondingly less likely to fail the tests to which they subsequently (of course) must still be subjected. However, this degree of formality is not necessarily needed. What is required of everyday programmers is that, as they write their programs, they think — and code — in a way that respects a correctness-oriented point of view. Assertions can be written informally, in natural language: just the “thinking of what those assertions might be” guides the program-construction process in an astonishingly effective way. What is also required are the engineering principles referred to above. Connecting programs with their specifications through assertions provides training on abstraction, which, in turn, encourages simplicity and focus, helping build more robust, flexible and usable systems.

The answer to “Who needs it?” is that everyday programmers and software developers indeed may not need to know the theory of FM. But they do need to know is how to practise it, even if with a light touch, benefiting from its precepts. FM theory, which is what explains — to the more mathematically inclined — why FM works, has become confused with the FM practice of using the theory’s results to benefit from what it assures. Any “everyday programmer” can do that...except that most do not.

The paper posits 3 levels of "Formal Methods Thinking" viz.

a) Level 1 (“What’s True Here”). Level 1 of FM thinking is the application of FM in its most basic form. Students develop abilities to understand their programs and reason about their correctness using informal descriptions. By “What’s True Here”, we mean including natural language prose or informal diagrams to describe the properties that are true at different points of a program’s execution rather than the operations that brought them about.

b) Level 2 (Formal Assertions). Level 2 introduces greater precision to Level 1 by teaching students to write assertions that incorporate arithmetic and logical operators to capture FM thinking more rigorously. This may be accompanied by lightweight tools that can be used to test or check that their assertions hold.

c) Level 3 (Full Verification). This level enables students to prove program properties using tools such as a theorem prover, model checker or SMT solver. But in addition to tool-based checking of properties (now written using a formal language), this level can formally emphasise other aspects of system-level correctness, such as structural induction and termination.