Editors’ note: AI has been actively pushing the frontier of applied formal methods for computing systems. In this article, the Specula team wrote about their experience of evaluating LLMs on modeling system code, the basic capability for agentic model checking, using TLA+, a specification language for concurrent and distributed systems. The article is the 7th blog in The Next Horizon of System Intelligence series. Several months ago, we asked Claude to write a TLA+ specification (spec) for...

Can LLMs model real-world systems in TLA+?
Qian Cheng; Ruize Tang; Emilie Ma; Finn Hackett; Peiyang He; Yiming Su; Ivan Beschastnikh; Yu Huang; Xiaoxing Ma; Tianyin Xu
