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Company as Code

blog.42futures.com

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Re: Company as Code

#91

Post by staticshock »

The main problem here is that real people operate in fuzzy domains. Snapping them into place "with code" won't magically resolve the gray areas inherent to the most valuable real workflows.

Think about the prized "high agency worker." What makes them desirable is the willingness and ability to make well informed, unilateral decisions on matters that are likely not yet organizationally codified, or codified in a way that is "wrong" for the task at hand.

Also, the reason terraform works is because it is _operational_. As in, it's actual code that runs. If it was mere documentation, it would drift like nobody's business. In order to make "organizational code" operational, you would need enforcement (a compliance team?) manually keeping the documentation in sync with reality in all of the meat and thought spaces where real work happens.

The only place where this can plausibly be automated is in digital spaces. In fact, I'm surprised the article doesn't go there: "organizational code" starts feeling way more plausible as definition for AI agents than for real people, specifically because agents are operationalized in digital spaces, where enforcement can be automated.

Re: Company as Code

#92

Post by alexhans »

> Has anyone tried this yet? If not, why not?

Yes (in a minimalistic TDD like way?). [1]

I agree that the company as code can be tested without too much risk if you think about as "model your world drawing a circle around what you own".

You can be your own auditor constantly so that you pre-answer questions you would ask in an audit.

I would advise against the always tempting "we are the everything platform" because that rafely scales and makes you a bottleneck. You won't be able to keep up. It's easier to model the tribal knowledge of your own world knowing where the frontiers are and that can even be a forcing function to simplify and reduce externalities.

- [1] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/series/evals/automate-audit...

Edit: make sure whoever works on it is pain point driven and solves things for themselves and then you will build just enough. A world that is more programmatic and can tolerate fuzzy translations (MCPs/LLMs) and where you can test (evals) the level of quality you need can make this cost effective.

Re: Company as Code

#93

Post by InitialLastName »

titanomachy wrote: post #68
graybeardhacker wrote: post #58

Two major factors I see a impediment to this: 1. Most management doesn't understand it and therefore won't champion it. 2. Those few that do understand it will resist it because it reduces the need for management and process. This is similar to the Bible being in a dead language only understood by priests. But how amazing would it be if everything from company policy to product specifications was in a format that cou…

The New Testament is actually in Greek, if you go to any church in Greece they are reading from it in the original language and people understand it fine.

Virtually none of the Bible was written in a currently-dead language. Only small bits were written in Aramaic, and Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew are pretty much comprehensible to modern Greek and Hebrew speakers.

Even the Christian era of the Bible being distributed in Latin made perfect sense since it was originally mostly being distributed to people who spoke Latin with questionable accents (and where Latin was the language everyone who was literate was literate in).

Re: Company as Code

#94

Post by agumonkey »

stego-tech wrote: post #52

This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen. The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization. Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need…

Any books about workgroup power dynamics ? i'm fascinated (morbidly in a way) by that

Re: Company as Code

#95

Post by staticshock »

maebert wrote: post #79

I love the vision, but it glosses over the most important difference between Infrastructure and Companies. Infrastructure as code is prescriptive. The code is the source of truth, and the world gets crested from it. Company as code is descriptive. It is constantly catching up to meat-space, rather than creating it. Changes are gradual instead of instant roll-outs. Patterns change over time and only get documented lat…

Nailed it. I think about prescriptivism / descriptivism in terms of these archetypes:

- "Rule followers" think an org will be better off if everyone agreed on a set of rules to follow. At the boundaries, they will think about establishing new rules to clarify and codify new things. Charitably, I'd add that they might remove rules that are obsolete, but we all know this is not sufficiently true in practice: governments, for example, are much more likely to add new rules than to remove old ones.

- "Rule breakers" think that most rules are suggestions. At the boundaries, they will see rules other people are needlessly bound by, and translate those into strategic openings for whatever game they're playing. For better and for worse, start-up ecosystems are full of people like this.

Rule followers want to be told what's allowed, while rule breakers try to figure out what _should_ be allowed from first principles. At the extreme, they tug the world towards authoritarianism or towards anarchy.

This is obviously a spectrum, so everyone has both of these archetypes in them, albeit in different proportions (e.g. most people pay taxes, but almost no one drives the speed limit).

Re: Company as Code

#96

Post by madmax96 »

This is exactly what model-based systems engineering tools like SysML v2 are designed for. Model-based systems engineering aims to generate _all_ engineering artifacts from a formal model.

Imagine it -- security policies, infrastructure, etc. all codified in a formal model.

- Push-button generation of ISO-27001 documentation.

- Push-button generation of Terraform.

- Push-button generation of SpiceDB policies.

- ...

There is _a lot_ of missing technology, but this is critically important because it will help us ensure regulatory compliance at far greater speeds in fields like nuclear and automotive. And it enables automated reasoning over the models, to make sure you're actually doing what you set out to do.

Re: Company as Code

#97

Post by AceJohnny2 »

miohtama wrote: post #39

I recommend book Accelerado by Charlie Stross: Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contr…

Accelerando's algorithmic company structure and (near?)DDoS the corporate legal system is the one idea from Accelerando that has stuck with me the most over the 20 years since I first read it, and I came here to make the exact same reference.

(that, and the notion of Exocortex, which is what I've named some of my smartphones...)

Re: Company as Code

#98

Post by willhslade »

agumonkey wrote: post #94
stego-tech wrote: post #52

This is not a new or novel idea. I proposed such a thing at the start of my career in tech, and repeatedly propose it when I feel I have ears willing to listen. The problem - and I do mean the problem, the only problem - is the threat this poses to power dynamics in the organization. Compliance people do not benefit from their outputs being readily searchable and indexed like this, because it means there’s less need…

Any books about workgroup power dynamics ? i'm fascinated (morbidly in a way) by that

Harvard Business Review's Office Politics. Or any intro Industrial Psychology textbook.

Re: Company as Code

#99

Post by burakemir »

The approach described here - model things as graph - can really be applied to model any domains.

If you are into this type of modelling, you may find value in Mangle, a datalog-based logic programming language and deductive database library. You do not need to invent dozens of DSLs but can do it all in one. And without all the RDF trouble.

https://github.com/google/mangle

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756800

Talk at REBASE 2025 "From Facts to Theories" https://youtu.be/UjOEHSZDBH8?si=qAjnkBQfPKMVaOPW

Re: Company as Code

#100

Post by 6510 »

In the future there will be one giant AI on premise with many physical bodies made in our own image to micromanage the humans. All conversations are monitored, depending on the complexity of your query and who you are talking to tokens are deducted from your account. A complex double-entry book keeping system divides the tokens and quality of the response over the things the company should be doing. Things will be neither investor, employee nor customer centric but 100% AI centric.
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