Definition
Plain language
A guarantee that something bad never happens in a system, no matter how events unfold.
As stated in the literature
In formal methods, a property asserting that a bad state is never reached under any execution or interleaving; contrasted with liveness, which asserts that something good eventually happens. Model checkers like TLC verify safety properties such as deadlock-freedom and mutual exclusion.
Also called: safety properties
Why it matters: It matters because guaranteeing that a bad state can never happen is essential wherever a single failure could be catastrophic.
For example, an elevator's safety property might be that its doors never open while the car is moving between floors.
Heard on the show
“That's the intellectual move: taking a safety property and making it a measurable capability the field can optimize against.”Episode 190 — The Skill Every AI Manager Is Missing: Handing Out Exactly the Right Keys