# Marcus Osei, Principal Engineer at Cambrian Financial (170 people) — read of Verified, June 5 2026

> 11 years shipping backend systems, last 4 in fintech where a bad deploy costs more than my salary. Currently the most senior IC on a team that uses Copilot and hates it quietly.

## How I got here

I searched "AI code generation with formal verification" after a meeting where my VP asked why we keep shipping subtle off-by-one errors that pass all tests. Third result. The headline said "Provably Correct Code, Every Time" and I clicked because that specific claim is either a lie or it's interesting and I want to know which.

My daughter had a soccer game at 8 AM so I'm reading this at 9:30 with cold coffee, low patience.

## What I clicked first

"Provably Correct Code, Every Time" pulled me in, then immediately threw me. I was expecting a product page. Instead I got a dashboard that said "$-86,000 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" and "1 in 14 Meaningful-success odds." I actually scrolled back up to check the URL because I thought I landed somewhere wrong.

This is not a product. This is someone selling me the idea of building this product. Those are different things.

## Where I paused

"Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

That sentence stopped me. It is genuinely unusually honest for this format. I've read enough Gumroad-brained "SaaS starter kits" to know that honesty about zero traction is rare. So either this is a real attempt at transparency, or it's a rhetorical trick to lower my guard before I hit the $99 button. I couldn't decide which. I sat there for maybe 45 seconds.

## What I distrusted

The framing buries the actual product. What does formally-verified-code-generator actually DO? Like, mechanically. Does it use Lean? TLA+? SMT solvers? Does it verify my existing code, generate new code with proofs attached, or is "formally verified" marketing language for "we ran a linter harder than usual"?

The page never tells me. The hero is a claim. The body is a business scorecard. The pricing is for a dossier about the claim. I have no idea what this actually does technically and that is a significant failure for a product aimed at engineers.

"buyer clarity: 10/10" is listed as a strength axis, which is ironic given that I, a buyer, have zero clarity about what I'm buying.

## What would convince me

One concrete technical example. Something like: "You write a function that calculates compound interest. Our tool outputs the function plus a machine-checkable proof that the output matches the formula for all valid inputs, not just your test cases." Something I could evaluate as an engineer. Not a Fermi estimate. A demo or a before/after.

If this thing actually integrates with a real proof assistant, name it. Engineers in this space know what Coq and Z3 are. Naming the underlying verification mechanism would do more work than any "provably correct" headline.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. When you say "formally verified," what verification technique is actually under the hood? Is there a proof artifact I can inspect, or is this a confidence score from a model?
2. Who is this for right now, an individual engineer evaluating it, or a company integration? The pricing suggests individual but the use case you're describing is team-level.
3. You scored "financial upside: 2/10" on your own idea. That's a strange thing to publish. Does that mean you don't believe in the market, or does it mean the market exists but monetizing it is hard?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The honesty about zero customers and the Fermi math scoring their own downside is legitimately rare and earned a second look. But I came here for a tool and I still don't know what the tool does, which means the page failed the basic job. If someone sent me one paragraph explaining the actual verification mechanism I'd reply the same day.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-05. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*