Hillel Wayne

Beliefs Korrents

• Korrents What they believe 45 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.

  Each is a korrent — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.

  Recent

  • Every branch of engineering hates waterfall, not just software.

    If I had to summarize what I found in general, I'd put it like this. Everybody hates waterfall.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • The core tension of all engineering is between how expensive a mistake is and how quickly you can iterate, and that alone decides how much planning a field does.

    The core tension of engineering is between how expensive it is to make a mistake and how quickly you can iterate. The faster you can iterate, the less planning you need to do before you iterate, and the more expensive it is, the more planning you need to do.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Software did not invent iterative development: mining engineers had their Agile revolution in 1960.

    And the first thing he pointed out to me was that they had their Agile revolution in 1960.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  Show 42 more

  • Software is the only field of human labour with practitioner conferences and freely shared knowledge; every other field has only academic conferences and trade shows.

    Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    open source

  • Version control is the one thing every traditional engineer wishes their old field had.

    Yeah, I interviewed like 20 people on this. I think all 20 mentioned version control as the thing they wish they had in their old field.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Software iterates better than every other engineering field and plans worse than all of them.

    while we are a lot better at iterating than other fields, we're worse at the planning part. Like we still need to do some kind of planning before we iterate and we just aren't as good as those other fields.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Other engineering fields compile deep reference books about their materials and software has nothing of the kind, not even a five-hundred-page book on how to version an API.

    And that kind of compiling of information about the materials is something other fields do that we don't do. An analogy that I would think of in software would be something like a 500-page book on how to version an API.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Software developers probably are engineers after all, on the evidence of the people who did both jobs -- though that research was done before LLMs.

    I think this project and writing about it and thinking about it has firmly moved me from the camp of we are definitely not to we probably are.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    LLMs

  • Formal methods are not used everywhere because for most real problems writing down what the function should do is itself a nightmare, and a program that is right ninety-nine per cent of the time is good enough.

    when you start talking about like most interesting domain problems, you have to pull in so much context that basically even writing what the function is supposed to do becomes a nightmare. The imperative program you write that will get correct 99% of the time is probably good enough to use in almost all cases.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Nuclear power plants, the standard example of software that must be proved correct, do not care about formal verification: thorough testing is enough for them.

    but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    energy

  • Verifying a simplified model rather than the real system is worth doing even though the real system will still have bugs, because the bugs you designed in never get built.

    Then the actual system might still have bugs, but we can iron out the issues in the abstraction such that we don't actually build them in the real system.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Concurrency is hard not because human brains cannot handle it but because nobody gets enough practice at it.

    I think a large part of the problem of why it's hard for us is because you don't get a lot of practice. Usually when you have a race condition in a system, you find out months later and then you try a fix and you find out weeks later after that if the fix actually worked.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Most mathematics will never be useful to a developer; what pays is knowing what mathematics exists so you can find the part that is.

    But I think it is more useful for most developers to have an exposure to like what math has in the various fields versus just going all in every single field when they see them, right? You've got to know what's available to know what's most useful for you. And most math will not be useful for you.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Programmers fail to recognise how much mathematics their job uses because the mathematics it needs is discrete and school teaches the continuous kind.

    And I wonder sometimes if that is the reason people don't recognize the use of math in software engineering is because the math they do need is not the math they've been exposed to.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Formal methods shine in highly computational domains and struggle wherever the problem is embedded in human business behaviour.

    I think the case of TLA+ and most, not all, but most formal methods, they shine the most in highly computational domains, where most of the problems are highly technical and not like business embedded.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Engineers are sceptical of formal methods because they were burned by CASE and UML, sold as miracle solutions and imposed on them regardless of fit.

    I think a lot of the reason people are skeptical of these is because they've been burned by things like case and UML and all these other miracle solutions that were forced on them by people who wanted them to use it no matter what.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.

    I love formal methods, but I think it's a fairly niche tool for most people and I think like property-based testing is in general going to be useful for more people.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • To get good results out of an LLM you have to already know how to get them without it; the model only makes it faster.

    As a general thing we've seen like to get good results you have to already know how to get good results without it. It just helps you get good results faster.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    LLMs

  • AI does a good job of generating a design and still cannot express what the design is supposed to do; that part is the engineer's.

    And often I found with my clients I have to tell them like it's doing a good job at generating the actual design, but in actually expressing what the design is supposed to do, it cannot do that yet. You have to do that part yourself.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • AI is making formal methods more popular without making them mainstream, moving them from about a tenth of a per cent of engineers to three tenths.

    I think it is making it more popular. I don't know if it'll make it go mainstream, but it's definitely making it a lot more popular. It's bringing it from maybe like 0.1% to 0.3% which is huge.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • The software job losses of the past few years were caused more by the end of zero-interest-rate money and the post-COVID crash than by AI.

    So, it's hard to tell how much of like the loss of the past few years was AI versus the end of like zero interest rate policy and like the post-COVID crash. And I think it's more the latter, but like again, LLMs are still getting better.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    LLMsinterest rates

  • Within ten years software development will survive but become ordinary white-collar work, with no more two-hundred-thousand-dollar salaries or unlimited vacation.

    I predict that in the next 10 years software development will survive, but it will become like any other white-collar professional work. No more $200,000 salaries, unlimited vacation, or incredible employee bargaining power.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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    AI and jobs

  • Software written for three people, a family or one school, is now possible for everyone, and that will change the world in strange and terrifying as well as exciting ways.

    And up until now that like could only really happen if one of those people in that family that community or that school was like really really into computers. But now it's possible for everybody to have situated software.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Nobody in software treats debugging as a discipline; it is left as a handful of basic heuristics.

    But this is the book that I give to every junior engineer because I think like nobody ever really talks about debugging as like a discipline outside of like basic heuristics.

    Formal methods with Hillel Wayne Said 29 Jul 2026

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  • Almost nothing programmers believe is unique to software is actually unique to software.

    Almost everything we think is unique about software appears in every other field of engineering.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Software is not uniquely unpredictable; other engineering disciplines are hit by the same surprises and overruns.

    To assume that software is uniquely unpredictable is a special kind of arrogance.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Software's real advantage over physical engineering is consistency: a component does what it is specified to do every time, while physical materials only fall within a tolerance.

    Software is far more consistent than any other kind of engineering.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • The one uncontested difference between software and other engineering is velocity: changing software costs seconds where changing a physical system costs weeks and thousands of dollars.

    We can change software much faster than anybody else can change their systems.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Because software is the cheapest part of a system to change, other disciplines lean on it to paper over their own physical problems, and that reliance has killed people.

    Rather than fix a trad issue with trad engineering, Boeing opted for the software kludge, and then people died.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Software is not less rigorous than traditional engineering; its record-keeping and automated verification are better than most of that field's.

    Plenty would kill to get the same kind of automated testing we treat as a given.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Software's constraints are soft where traditional engineering's are hard, and that is one of the few real differences between them.

    But constraints in software tend to be soft constraints.

    We Are Not Special Said 20 Jan 2021

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  • Software development is separated from engineering by circumstance rather than essence, and most programmers could cross that gap without retraining.

    We are separated from engineering by circumstance, not by essence, and we can choose to bridge that gap at will.

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • The argument about whether programming is engineering is conducted entirely by people who have never worked as engineers.

    None of the people arguing for or against software engineering as engineering have worked as engineers.

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • People who worked as traditional engineers before moving into software say that software engineering is real engineering.

    Of the 17 crossovers I talked to, 15 said yes.

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • Programming is mathematical work: it uses discrete mathematics rather than the continuous mathematics people picture when they say maths.

    Just because we use a different branch of math doesn't mean we're not doing engineering.

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • Licensing is a political and social construct, so an unlicensed profession can still be doing engineering.

    licenses exist because we are part of society and have legal requirements, not because they are essential to what it means to do engineering

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • High consequences cannot be what makes work engineering, because most traditional engineering is low-stakes too.

    Much of the engineering there is low-stakes, low-consequence, just like much software is.

    Are We Really Engineers? Said 18 Jan 2021

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  • Formal methods are not standard practice even in high-assurance software such as medical devices and aircraft.

    most people in high-assurance software don't use formal methods

    Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Said 21 Jan 2019

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  • The hard part of verification is not proving the code correct but working out what the specification should say.

    Finding the right spec is one of the biggest challenges in formal methods.

    Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Said 21 Jan 2019

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  • Most distributed-systems outages would have been prevented by slightly more comprehensive ordinary testing, not by better tools.

    In fact, the vast majority of distributed systems outages could have been prevented by slightly-more-comprehensive testing.

    Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Said 21 Jan 2019

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  • Full formal verification is a waste of money for most software: near-perfect is reachable with ordinary techniques at a fraction of the cost.

    You do not need full code verification to write good software or even to write near-perfect software.

    Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Said 21 Jan 2019

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  • There is a permanent trade-off in verification: an expressive language is hard to prove things about, and a language that is easy to prove things about is hard to write in.

    Formal verifiers have a dilemma: the more expressive the language, the harder it is to prove anything in it. But the less expressive the language, the harder it is to write anything in it.

    Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Said 21 Jan 2019

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  • Robert C. Martin's advice makes code worse, because it dismisses every correctness technique that is not unit testing.

    Uncle Bob gives terrible advice. Following it will make your code worse.

    Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets Said 5 Oct 2017

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  • Programmer discipline is the wrong answer to software defects: the way to reduce them is to change the system so mistakes are harder to make and easier to catch.

    Rather, the best way to reduce the volume and severity of mistakes is to adjust the system itself.

    Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets Said 5 Oct 2017

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  • Unit tests alone give little confidence in a program, because the mistakes people actually make are not the conveniently unit-testable ones.

    But unit tests don't give you much confidence in your code.

    Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets Said 5 Oct 2017

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  All 45 beliefs →