External parties can’t do any meaningful discrimination between human and agent effort when the agent is doing the communicating. One may only read what’s there
I’m not saying that the author is inept or that they have done no work. There can be plenty of great underlying mathematics behind something that is vibecoded.
The reason I worry about the use of agents here is not because it invalidates any ideas or research done by the author; rather, it editorializes and oversells. It presents the claims of the work as an all encompassing solution to all of the worlds problems
There may very well be tons of great ideas here. However as presented, it reads as though the language is the solution to creating vibecoded apps and is equipowerful to state of the art proof assistants while being orders of magnitude more performant. That is a huge claim that has not yet been substantiated, and I do not believe that solely a human is currently making that claim
Regarding substantiation -- they released source code and demos. As far as I understand, the weakness is that proofs are very verbose as there are no strategies. etc. However, they are making a separate service for making these proofs using proprietary technology: https://bend-lang.com/bender
Yes, it doesn't look like a paper at all. I can see the idea, and it's an interesting idea, but no proofs that it works, no measurements, and no proper citations.
Nobody claims Victor hasn't done a lot of research. But academically inclined people typically expect claims to be substantiated either formally or empirically or both.
Academic people might have more trust in a paper which when through a lengthy publication process. But if you think about it, it's not a better proof than a direct access to the thing. It used to be hard to try out software but with modern tech it literally takes minutes...
Have you evaluated it?
Wouldn’t you be inclined to withhold any claims of anything being substantiated until it’s actually been evaluated?