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Posted by ahamez 1 day ago

Company as Code(blog.42futures.com)
261 points | 127 commentspage 4
graybeardhacker 1 day ago|
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 could be programmatically accessed and tracked? When/if you needed a document you would access it from an artifactory where it had been generated and versioned automatically?

It may very well be that LLMs will push this idea to the forefront. PDFs and Word Docs suck for AI interaction. As we incorporate LLMs into our businesses it might be a natural progression to move toward databases, LaTex, code and source control for documentation and policy.

titanomachy 1 day ago|
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.
hunterpayne 1 day ago|||
Modern Greek speakers can NOT understand ancient Greek. And modern Hebrew is NOT mutually intelligible with Aramaic. The OP is correct and the two responses are nonsense. Also, in the 1500s when the Bible was translated to English, very few Europeans spoke Latin and if they did it was a very different Latin from the translations from the Roman era (pre 500 or so). Languages change over time and the Latin spoken by the aristocrats in the 1500s was very very different from the Latin spoken by the Romans.
titanomachy 1 day ago||
I simply made the observation that when you go to churches in Greece, they are speaking the original New Testament and people can understand it. Which part are you refuting, that the priest is reading the original text or that the parishioners can understand him?

It certainly sounds strange and unlike how any modern Greek person would speak, but it can be basically understood especially if you are a bit used to it. I’m not an expert but I think it’s probably a smaller gap than say Latin and modern Italian. Definitely a smaller gap than English and Old English, despite being more than twice as old!

InitialLastName 1 day ago|||
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).

v3ss0n 1 day ago||
Very narrow spec of how company can fit into code.Try Integrating ERP system in non-tech business. You will see how resistant the people are to use a software that streamline their business and need customization that fit their operation procedures or outright resistance because it would make things a lot easier and make them irrelevant.

On successful integration all they would use ERP system would be for signing in , chatting, producing invoices, the rest would still be done manually, if lucky in excel files.

1dom 1 day ago||
I always felt the idea of trying to align your code, policy, software and infrastructure so it's easy to do compliance is the bread and butter of devops and devsecops in a regulated environment,

Is this an article by someone who's just done ISO 27001 for the first time and realised that?

Quothling 1 day ago||
Is this not basically Azure Management Groups for policy rules, Entra ID for identity management linked to whatever HR system your organisation has? Since we're in the Microsoft world you'd probably sprinkle Cluedin or whatever it's called on top of it for mdm.

I don't necessarily recommend living in the Microsoft cloud, but it's what companies do in Denmark, so it's what I know.

madmax96 1 day ago||
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.

gglitch 1 day ago||
If I had the capacity to take on this kind of modeling project right now, I'd probably lean toward Prolog or something like an OWL/Protégé ontology. Then it could just metastasize to the limits of my time and neurochemistry.
w10-1 1 day ago||
Amazon and Koch Industries are are probably the significant companies that come closest to this level of description and prescription.

You'd need something like probabilistic programming language to model discretion.

You'd want some way to compare organizational forms -- minimally build vs buy, but preferably also control via monitoring+specification vs selection+incentive alignment.

You'd probably need the kind of sensors and telemetry that no one would like, to avoid drowning in book-keeping.

Overall, what would the benefit be?

WilcoKruijer 1 day ago||
The DSL described in this post really resonates with me. I recently worked on a programming language that uses similar structures [0]. It lets the user define entities and their shape (Role, OrganisationalUnit, Person in this post) and entries for those entities. It contains a small scripting API that can be used to derive information from these "facts". Company as code could definitely be implemented on top of this.

[0] https://thalo.rejot.dev/blog/plain-text-knowledge-management

oftenwrong 1 day ago||
This is perhaps a bit different, but Fossil supports storing more types of written company artifacts in the repo:

>One notable feature of Fossil is that it bundles bug tracking, wiki, forum, chat, and technotes with distributed version control to give you an all-in-one software project management system.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/whyallinone.md

clcaev 1 day ago|
Well developed and maintained Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) go along way towards repeatable human processes. The hard part is finding the organizational discipline to use/maintain them.
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