@johncarlosbaez
I don't agree that working with a proof assistant will reduce the chance that we'll come up with radical new ideas.
It's not at all difficult for me to picture someone like Grothendieck, who also broke out of many existing formalisms, writing his own library from scratch in order to express his ideas -- In many ways this is exactly what he did! Though of course he (and his collaborators) wrote a long series of books rather than writing a long list of agda/lean/etc files.
In fact, it's quite easy for me to picture someone like Grothendieck writing their own theorem prover! Perhaps in that world EGA/SGA would look much more like the currently-under-development synthetic algebraic geometry, formalized in a proof assistant that's custom made for arguments in the (big) zariski or etale topos.
@andrejbauer @dougmerritt @MartinEscardo @JacquesC2 @pigworker @xenaproject