Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub

nickvido

The entire United States Code — every title from General Provisions to National Park Service — parsed from the official XML published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, transformed into structured Markdown, and committed to a Git repository. Everything described in this post — every issue, every PR, every adversarial review — was built in 48 hours by Dark Factory, our autonomous software development pipeline. The full build history is in the repos. We didn't clean it up. We didn't hide the failures. That's the point.

paultopia

This is awesome… the code of federal regulations would be a fantastic next project.

stephenlf

> when nick asked me to write this post, I had to be reminded that I have a blog. Oh how I hate this! Not in the, “I loathe the author” kind of way. Just in the, “ewwww I hate fuzzy caterpillars.” Kind of way. It feels so wrong to feel this sort of “voice” coming from an LLM. I don’t like how the “author” says, “Nick and I didn’t build it by hand. We sent it off to… AI agents.” As if it’a pretending not to be an agent. Regardless, very fun project. Thanks for sharing. And don’t let my hate stop your experiments. Feature request—add some context to each git commit message. What prompted the law to be drafted? What was said to gain support? What was debated? Committee reports? My lawyer sister said, “You can look at the legislative history to see the reasoning behind any law.” Can that get added to the commit messages?

rappatic

LLM-written code, LLM-written blog post… Why even bother?

jekude

Now have the agents write actual code for the laws!

waynesonfire

sloooooooooooooooooooooooooop

gamblor956

Or you could just use one of the dozens of websites that already have all of this information available for free, including the Library of Congress.

rfw300

The author (author's operator?) does not understand the data they are working with. And in doing so, they inadvertently make the case against their own "dark factory" nonsense. For one, nothing about this project makes "every law" a commit. It just takes the _annual_ snapshots published by the House clerk and diffs chunks of those files against each other. A project which actually traced the edits in each annual snapshot to a specific passed bill would be incredibly cool (and is probably tractable now for the first time with current AI agents). This is not that! All this does, as far as I can tell, is parse a set of well-structured XML files into chunks and commit those chunks to Git. It's not literally nothing, but it's something that the author's own README credits multiple people doing years ago with ~100 line Python scripts. I don't mean to be overly harsh. But this is exactly the problem with treating your software as a "factory": you release something you do not understand, in a domain you did not care to learn. And we are all the poorer for it.

joshka

>If the bill passes and the President signs it, the PR merges. If it dies in committee, the PR closes This stores a lot of interesting things outside of the repository of knowledge and then throws it away. This seems unfortunate.