Towards Integrating Copiloting and Formal Methods: Building Blocks, Architecture, and Challenges

Paper in proceeding, 2025

In order for future development environments to support the production of highly trustworthy software in an efficient, developer friendly way, an integrated exploitation of three building blocks will be essential: language servers, LLM-based copiloting, and verification technology. The formal methods community has long faced challenges with the availability of modern, user-friendly tooling, potentially affecting its broader adoption in industry. This paper explores the complex and rapidly evolving landscape of development tooling within modern programming environments. Given this rapid advancement, developers and researchers, often concentrated on their specific subfields, face uncertainty about where to begin when creating development tools. This paper aims to provide an informal guide to the existing design space surrounding code assistants and copilots. We explore successful projects within the realm of theorem proving and verification, describing their high-level design components and how they relate to each other. This work also examines how existing tools can be leveraged to facilitate the development of new formal methods tooling, building upon established abstractions. Moreover, we present visions for the future of formal methods tooling, drawing insights from the successes and limitations of current systems.