AI coding Ethereum for speed and for security

https://firefly.social/post/x/2026252944639934778

This is quite an impressive experiment. Vibe-coding the entire 2030 roadmap within weeks.

Obviously such a thing built in two weeks without even having the EIPs has massive caveats: almost certainly lots of critical bugs, and probably in some cases "stub" versions of a thing where the AI did not even try making the full version. But six months ago, even this was far outside the realm of possibility, and what matters is where the trend is going.

AI is massively accelerating coding (yesterday, I tried agentic-coding an equivalent of my blog software, and finished within an hour, and that was using gpt-oss:20b running on my laptop (!!!!), kimi-2.5 would have probably just one-shotted it).

But probably, the right way to use it, is to take half the gains from AI in speed, and half the gains in security: generate more test-cases, formally verify everything, make more multi-implementations of things.

A collaborator of the @leanethereum effort managed to AI-code a machine-verifiable proof of one of the most complex theorems that STARKs rely on for security.

A core tenet of @leanethereum is to formally verify everything, and AI is greatly accelerating our ability to do that. Aside from formal verification, simply being able to generate a much larger body of test cases is also important.

Do not assume that you'll be able to put in a single prompt and get a highly-secure version out anytime soon; there WILL be lots of wrestling with bugs and inconsistencies between implementations. But even that wrestling can happen 5x faster and 10x more thoroughly.

People should be open to the possibility (not certainty! possibility) that the Ethereum roadmap will finish much faster than people expect, at a much higher standard of security than people expect.

On the security side, I personally am excited about the possibility that bug-free code, long considered an idealistic delusion, will finally become first possible and then a basic expectation. If we care about trustlessness, this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. Total security is impossible because ultimately total security means exact correspondence between lines of code and contents of your mind, which is many terabytes (see https://firefly.social/post/x/2025653045414273438 ). But there are many specific cases, where specific security claims can be made and verified, that cut out >99% of the negative consequences that might come from the code being broken.