I doubt some of this article's claims.
> At present, a human with specialist expertise still has to guide the process, but it’s not hard to extrapolate and imagine that process becoming fully automated in the next few years.
We already had some software engineers here on HN explain that they don't make a large use of LLMs because the hard part of their job isn't to actually write the code, but to understand the requirements behind it. And formal verification is all about requirements.
> Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought. But writing the spec is vastly easier and quicker than writing the proof by hand, so this is progress.
Writing the spec is easier once you are confident about having fully understood the requirements, and here we get back to the above issue. Plus, it is already the case that you don't write the proof by hand, this is what the prover either assists you with or does in full.
> I find it exciting to think that we could just specify in a high-level, declarative way the properties that we want some piece of code to have, and then to vibe code the implementation along with a proof that it satisfies the specification.
And here is where I think problems will arise: moving from the high level specification to the formal one that is the one actually getting formally verified.
Of course, this would still be better than having no verification at all. But it is important to keep in mind that, with these additional levels of abstractions, you will likely end up with a weaker form of formal verification, so to speak. Maybe it is worth it to still verify some high assurance software "the old way" and leave this only for the cases where additional verification is nice to have but not a matter of life or death.