Formal proofs for distributed protocols with AI may be closer than you think

This text is artisanally typed using Das Keyboard, with occasional suggestions by Copilot (most of them ignored anyways). The figures are generated with ChatGPT 5.5. In November 2024, I wrote a blog post about checking safety of the Ben-Or consensus protocol using TLA + and Apalache . The last section of the blog post introduces an inductive invariant IndInv that is used to prove protocol safety…