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by adastra22 320 days ago
Why? Coding assistants tend to do even better in contexts where they have tools like type checkers and linters to verify their implementations. This area seems actually uniquely well suited to LLM usage.
1 comments

When I asked experts on formal proofs a year ago, their intuition was that there isn't enough formal proofs out there for LLMs to be very good at the syntax.

It's, as far as I know, quite hard to teach an LLM things it doesn't know.

He is right and it doesn't matter because you can instantly tell if the proof the LLM generates is true or not.
I see people on Zulip using Copilot to write Lean proofs, and they have some success, but the quality is really bad right now, creating long, unmaintainable proofs. New users get stuck, thinking they're 90% of the way to the end, but really the whole thing probably should be scrapped and they should start over.

It's a bit frustrating because, before Copilot, new users would come with proofs and you could spend some time helping them write better proofs and they'd learn things and gain skills, but now it's not clear that this is time well spent on my part. Copilot is not going to learn from my feedback.