Oh, definitely. I am not saying that not doing the normal agile crap for development brings us closer to AGI. What I would venture to say though is that trying stuff like formal verification and finding a way to integrate it in a daily workflow would definitely help with the average quality of software developed through such a process. And that maybe the private labs are more liberal and let people's creativity achieve results.

Admittedly, yes, there's no proof. But we as an area are pretty stuck lately IMO. But that goes off-topic.