> I'd say the tech to go from detailed specs to reliable or secure systems isn't necessarily straight-forward except in the easy cases. It can take some serious

> I'd say the tech to go from detailed specs to reliable or secure systems isn't necessarily straight-forward except in the easy cases. It can take some serious work by smart people, esp if it's formal verification or spotting unknowns. I was being a little facetious. Of course the technical work is highly complex -- some of the brightest minds of our time work on DARPA related projects on foundational mathematics related to automated theorem proving. (Looking at you HoTT crew and related projects!) Why is DARPA funding automated theorem proving? Because they want to create high assurance software for government infrastructure to counter the threat of AI-based cyberwarfare, and our current mathematical techniques aren't up to muster. However, we've made tremendous progress on that problem in the span of around 100 years. By contrast, the problem of how to not incentivize your workers to do a shitty job, causing you problems later on... has been with us, I think it's safe to say, for thousands of years. (And it too, has attracted some of the brightest minds over the years.) So in a relative way, the technical aspects are "straight-forward" to address, compared to the underlying political problem. And the more technical methods only add some assurance that you've correctly implemented the spec as defined, not that you're doing the right thing. It's certainly good to, eg, check that you're using total functions or not misassigning memory, but it's not magic. So while they catch a lot of dangerous problems, they can also lead to false confidence about the existence of other classes of problems. > they say you can't engineer software, it takes ridiculous skill, or it would cost what NASA's team spends It mostly just requires that we consistently act with discipline and professionalism, which are both tiring compared to not doing them, so by and large, people just don't bother. I know I don't when I can get away with not doing it (even if I know that's a bad habit).