Dan Abramov got a Lean-verified proof of Conway's 50-year-old refinement conjecture for about 40 billion tokens
In a 2026-09-18 post Dan Abramov describes producing a mechanically verified Lean proof of Conway's refinement conjecture on omnific integers (if ab = cd then there exist e, f, g, h with a = ef, b = gh, c = eg, d = fh), with verification recorded in the Palomar registry, at roughly 40 billion tokens and about $40,000 in API cost. Early attempts produced grandiose but incoherent mathematics; what worked was separating Lean formalization of peer-reviewed sources from exploration of novel results, forcing standalone Lean files importing only Mathlib so the output stayed auditable, running specialized agents (PM, math researcher, red team, formalizer), and twice discarding all accumulated work to refocus. The transferable part is the auditing structure, not the mathematics.
↳ Follow the thread