Scaling Synthesis

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incremental formalization

Last updated April 28, 2022

Authored by:: Brendan Langen

Incremental formalization is a powerful design pattern for overcoming risks of formality, as described in Formality Considered Harmful. Synthesis tools need to support incremental formalization. Information is added in an informal fashion to begin, before formalizing once the task becomes clearer. Context is necessary for knowledge reuse, but this is difficult before we understand the task at hand.

This is a similar approach to Tiago Forte’s progressive summarization.