Ilya Sergey

New blog post: On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Property-Based Testing for Validating Formal Specifications. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/05/18/pro… The gist: randomised testing can validate formal specs. It's very cheap and powerful: we found bugs in specs of VERINA and CLEVER benchmarks.

Interesting discussion on LinkedIn regarding the no-AI-review policy we instituted for OOPSLA'27. The opponents' main argument: "peer reviews by humans mostly suck anyway, so by actively using LLMs to write reviews we won't lose much in quality, but will save everyone time".

@ShriramKMurthi This was a great read. Thanks for sharing!

This is a beautifully-written piece and extremely accessible to anyone just with mathematical maturity. Highly recommended. Crystallizes so many things that have been jostling around in my head in terms of work I've been looking for (around the Kolmogorov intuition).

Many people have claimed that with AI-assisted bug finding, secure code (and hence trustless anything) will be impossible. I have a much more optimistic take, and AI-assisted formal verification is a major part of the reason why: vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0…

Causal consistency is hard.

@HerrDreyer Giving a hard time about basic typing rules?

Come to MPI-SWS, and you too can stand around with me at a whiteboard I never use while I lecture you about basic typing rules! That's how research works, you know? (My students won't stop giving me a hard time about this... 🤣) linkedin.com/posts/were-lau…

I've sent my paper draft to colleagues for feedback. Every comment I got was amazingly informative and constructive. Each one was also absolutely idiotic. All of them were pretzels. And somehow, every last piece of feedback I got was a small dog named Mortimer.

@lastland0 @xuanalogue My meetings are side effect-free.

celebrating post-deadline just now! 3 NeurIPS submissions, first big conference push since starting as faculty -- we'll see how things turn out but I'm very proud of the students 😊

@AndrewCMyers By building tools, of course!

@ilyasergey How do we get the gold out there where it is useful to others?

Programming language research operates a gold mine. Adding gold is encouraged, even (and especially) when unrefined. Borrowing is permitted if you return more than you took. Refining it and spending on something useful counts for little. This is why the gold stays in the mine.

11. Last but not least, George Pîrlea's @GeorgePirlea talk on Veil: Multi-Modal Verification of Transition Systems ...and this is done with Lean @leanprover ! youtube.com/watch?v=24mMfU…

It was great to attend the #tlaplus community event this year and showcase our work on Veil and its new concrete state model checker, Lace. Thanks to the organisers for the invite!

If you're a late-stage PhD student or post-doc in computer science, and want a free trip to Singapore / NUS, consider applying for this prize: comp.nus.edu.sg/research/nus-c… Probably helps if you're considering a faculty job at NUS or other universities in Singapore!

@pavpanchekha More information on ACM SIGPLAN Research Highlights and the list of previously awarded papers can be found by the links below. Nominate one of your favourite papers from 2025 by June 15, 2026, and stay tuned! * sigplan.org/Highlights/ * sigplan.org/Highlights/Pap…

@pavpanchekha And, last but not least, highlight 3: "Multiverse Notebook: Shifting Data Scientists to Time Travelers" (OOPSLA 2024) by Shigeyuki Sato and Tomoki Nakamaru

On behalf of ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee, I'm thrilled to announce three exceptional papers on programming languages from 2024 that have been awarded SIGPLAN Research Highlight distinction! ⇒

Call for mentors: SPS Fellowship (June-Oct 2026, with @safewithatlas). Already in: Erik Meijer (@headinthebox) Leibniz Labs (creator of LINQ + Rx) Shriram Krishnamurthi (@ShriramKMurthi), Brown CS Senior formal methods + AI safety researchers, apply by Tue May 5 AoE: linktr.ee/apartresearch