Lef (@elefthei) header
Lef (@elefthei) profile picture

Proofs @Rise_MSR, @MSFTResearch. Compilers, Formal Verification, Cryptography. Previous: @Penn, @Bridgewater, @MIT.

Seattle, WA
Joined August 2009
Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)Photo by Lef (@elefthei)
Introducing Flint, @Recursive_SI’s first model: a fast local coding model built with our automated research system, the Eureka Machine. • Best-in-class fast local coding • Up to 2x faster than comparable models: 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro, 150+ on RTX Spark • Built from scratch in under 4 months Private, unmetered intelligence on your own machine. Open weights available now on @huggingface, run it locally on your favorite framework or try it for free on @opencode or @pidotdev.
640
895
640
8,224
3,482,211
I've never trusted code I didn't review until now. Agents write more code than any of us can review. We often end up skimming the PR/diff and pushing. Current review methods do not prove the code is correct or does what we asked. Recent research found the best AI code reviewer caught the bug on its first try only 42% of the time.* The evaluation bottleneck, regressions, and security incidents have forced us to find a better way. Introducing Proof-Driven Development Kit (PDD Kit) from @MSFTResearch. PDD Kit brings assurance to AI-generated code. You describe what you want to build in plain English. PDD Kit captures your objective, what we call your intent, and uses a verifier tool to prove the code meets it for every possible input. You never review a single line of the code or the proof. You review your plan and the defined objectives in natural language. A simple example is login. With testing, you check that only the correct password logs in a user but with a proof on top you can verify that there is no case a wrong password allows login. You can prove correctness and security across many complex scenarios. Not only does PDD Kit prove the correctness of your code, but also your intent so you can have confidence your code is correct and does what you asked. It provides a level of assurance that specs, code review, and tests never could. PDD Kit is in limited research preview. Video explainer below. If you want to learn more, I'll be sharing PDD Kit at GitHub Universe next week, Oct 28–29. Swing by the Speakeasy, ask for GitHub Next, and ask me about verified code. If you're in SF, let me know. *Yang et al., "(When) Should a Software Factory be Lights-off?", Microsoft Research and CMU, Oct 2026
How do you _guarantee_ your agent's code is correct? You prove it. Introducing Proof Driven Development Kit (PDD Kit) from @MSFTResearch. PDD Kit helps turn your plan into a formal spec, then proves the agent's code meets that spec for every input. No vibe verification. PDD Kit is integrated with @GitHubNext's Chopin, so you can plan as a team. PDD Kit takes an app's login flow from intent to a verified pull request: It discusses your code, infers your intent as it goes, and proposes a formal spec in Verus, a proof language for Rust. Once you approve the spec, the Verus verifier automatically proves the code meets it. Where proof isn't possible, it falls back to empirical verification with tests and computer-use agents (CUAs). It works on Rust today. No new language, no change in how you produce the underlying code, making formal methods more accessible. The goal is a verified software factory, where engineers review specifications instead of code. Come see it in action at GitHub Universe, Oct 28–29. Swing by the Speakeasy and ask for GitHub Next!
50
59
6
1,136
165,616
Neo in the Matrix, learns Kung-Fu without "training" by getting the skill uploaded to his brain. Our new architecture, Spotlight, enables LLMs to grow and gain new capabilities without changing their weights. Check out our work!
1/ What would it take for LLMs to be able to grow their own capabilities? We introduce spotlight, a memory architecture with growing capacity but with linear computational complexity. We show that this suffices to host evolving ecosystems like software by building Python directly into an LLM. We also share some very early language modeling results where it outperforms attention and linear attention on long context capabilities!
7
6
1
38
3,619
how it feels listening to this podcast
Andrej Karpathy calls AI Agents slop "Overall, the models they are not there. And I feel like the industry [...] it's making too big of a jump and it's trying to pretend that this is amazing. And it's not—it's slop! And I think they are not coming to terms with it. And maybe they are trying to fundraise or something like that, I'm not sure what's going on."
36
84
10
4,559
846,933
If you are at OOPSLA 2025, don't miss @elefthei's presentation of our paper "Structural temporal logic for mechanized program verification" on Saturday October 18, at 3:15 PM (Singapore time). Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14906. Code: github.com/vellvm/ticl.
1
1
4
328
I'm hiring at the EF: jobs.lever.co/ethereumfounda… If you're into Ethereum, cryptography, and formal verification, please get in touch! 🙂
9
42
5
255
25,875
Emina Torlak from @AWS delivered a wonderful keynote about the Cedar authorization engine. #cav2025
1
12
699
excited that my team at @Bloomberg is supporting PhD students in certified programming (and other infra/sec topics too!) through a fellowship. 💻🛡️ includes stipend, tuition, and internship. timely for Rocq and proof assistant folks as science funding tightens. please apply! 📬
#CFP: Applications for Bloomberg’s 2025-2026 #Infrastructure & #Security Ph.D. #Fellowship are now being accepted. Submission Deadline: Friday, July 18, 2025 (11:59 PM AoE) bloom.bg/3HLdfmO #InfoSec #supplychainsecurity #ProgramAnalysis #BugFinding
4
40
3,506
📣 Upenn Security & Privacy Seminars 📣 As the new semester begins, we’re excited to restart the SP Lab seminar series at the University of Pennsylvania! If you’d like to present your recent work in Cryptography, System Security, Blockchains, or related areas, please DM me!
1
1
17
1,535
︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎
32
14,825
268
76,271
2,647,136
Our recent paper on an overload control system for μservice applications called Rajomon was accepted for NSDI 25 🎉 This paper was led by @jiali_xing, who persisted and saw it through many resubmissions! The work started from an idea from 2021! See thread for more: ⬇️
3
5
48
2,998
I am looking for 1-2 PhD students interested broadly in computer systems, compilers, and/or PL! If you would like to do your PhD in a vibrant city with great weather, next to the sea 🌊, and the mountains 🏔️, make sure to apply to UCLA and mark my name as a potential advisor!
1
84
5
275
26,698
This is outrageous! The Global International Journal of Innovative Research has published an, apparently AI-generated, research article purporting to have been written by me, complete with a DOI. Why? To lend credence to the tile? global-us.mellbaou.com/index… doi.org/10.59613/global.v1i3…
16
27
5
75
20,918
Is this the first outage in IT history that isn't DNS
212
1,277
132
12,486
770,499
PostDoc position available in my Formally Verified Security group at MPI-SP. Looking for excellent research track record in PL (@poplconf and @icfp_conference) and/or security (@acm_ccs and @CSFSymposium ). Details here: groups.google.com/g/fstar-ma… #academicjobs #research #security
14
2
22
4,290
Tactic-based computer-aided proofs are the worst form of proofs – except for all the others that have been tried.
I have the same gut reaction to all tactic-based proof assistants, even as an expert user of a few. We may not yet have found a uniformly better method of presenting proofs to a computer, but tactics should certainly not be where the design space settles..
3
4
1
35
4,600
One reason AI works for code is that most people are just writing the same programs over and over. The elegant solutions to this problem are more abstract languages and more powerful libraries. But maybe AI will be the worse-is-better solution that wins.
111
216
54
2,474
288,736