Verification Without Inspection

A week ago I finished up at Westpac NZ. I was fortunate to spend the last few years there as a Distinguished Engineer, a role with an unusually wide and undefined remit. It was the perfect playground for a curious mind, giving me the freedom to think deeply about all sorts of interesting questions. The trouble is that there are only so many hours in the day, and it’s never enough for all the curiosities tugging at my mind. So I made the difficult decision to leave so I could create more time, at least for a while, to scratch a few of those itches. This post focuses on the one that I’m most passionate about. AI is fundamentally changing what it means to be a software engineer. As coding agents take over more of the writing, verification is quickly becoming where much of our time and focus is spent - and it isn’t the job most of us engineers signed up for. For the last eighteen months I’ve been wondering what could take some of that weight, and my gut keeps pointing back to something I…