About this episode

The episode discusses the role of formal methods in software engineering with guest Hillel Wayne, exploring their importance in complex systems and the potential impact of AI on their accessibility.

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — 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…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Hillel Wayne

Topics covered

• formal methods
• software engineering
• AI and verification
• TLA+
• distributed systems
• software development

Keywords

• formal verification
• TLA+
• software engineering
• AI
• distributed systems
• correctness
• complex systems

Sponsors

Antithesis, turbopuffer, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Pragmatic Engineer

More episodes of The Pragmatic Engineer

• Building Codex with Tibo Sottiaux · September 9, 2026 · 1h 13m
• Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori · August 26, 2026 · 1h 53m
• From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani · August 19, 2026 · 1h 32m
• Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors · August 12, 2026 · 1h 26m

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Pragmatic Engineer podcast page.