TBD

Title: The Loop: The interaction of creation and verification in designing complex systems

Abstract: In designing complex systems, a well-known (and somewhat inevitable) pattern is cyclic: alternating between a creative design and implementation phase, followed by a more reflective validation and verification phase, which either declares success, or identifies issues and goes back to the creative phase. The scale of this cycle in terms of time and effort varies wildly, going from years and millions of dollars to weeks in more "agile" philosophies.

The modern advent of LLMs which can reasonably design code and reason may dramatically reduce the size of this loop, by placing a completely automated solution on one or both sides of the cycle.

It is therefore interesting to examine how such loops work, and what their failure modes are. I will mostly talk about my experiences applying automated reasoning as a human component of such loops, usually on the validation side, but the lessons learned are applicable to a broader context.