Reality Is the Final Verifier: On Two Key Gaps in Agentic Software Engineering

Understand

Software development follows an implementation-verification loop in which developers or agents iteratively revise an implementation until an evaluator, such as a test suite, accepts it.

• The evaluator checks the implementation against a set of requirements under a model of the deployment environment.
• Yet even a formal proof that the implementation satisfies the requirements under the model cannot guarantee acceptable behavior after deployment.
• Requirements only approximate stakeholder intent, and the model only approximates the real deployment environment.