Meta's new structured prompting technique makes LLMs significantly better at code review — boosting accuracy to 93% in some cases

Deploying AI agents for repository-scale tasks like bug detection, patch verification, and code review requires overcoming significant technical hurdles. One major bottleneck: the need to set up dynamic execution sandboxes for every repository, which are expensive and computationally heavy. Using large language model (LLM) reasoning instead of executing the code is rising in popularity to bypass this overhead, yet it frequently leads to unsupported guesses and hallucinations. To improve execution-free reasoning, researchers at Meta introduce "semi-formal reasoning," a structured prompting technique. This method requires the AI agent to fill out a logical certificate by explicitly stating premises, tracing concrete execution paths, and deriving formal conclusions before providing an answer.