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.
Oof. You’re not totally wrong. I’ve parsed XML with XSDs since the days of Java. I looked at the 100 line Ruby implementation of parsing these files and thought “ack. (Not ACK) why do I need all of this?!”
Well it has a data loader, and hits APIs with retry logic, and has a CLI that can take arguments to run data downloads that can resume on fail, and yeah it parses the stupid XML with a “chapeau” tag - did you know that is French for hat? There is a tag that is the “hat” for a section and it is just like another title basically. So yeah, I would’ve had to learn all of that. But it also tests all of these things with actual tests. And the adversary complains if you write a test that isn’t actually testing anything meaningful. And if I needed to, I could reason about the architecture by reading the architecture design documents, which I have done at least a little bit and they are pretty nice, I have to admit.
Anyways - it’s a next step in the evolution of the laws in GitHub which is actually interesting to see them change and imagine what we can do with more data overlayed. Sadly the other repos were not maintained so this is the latest laws and you can view the diff from one Congress to another. Or you can git blame one of the files and see how old certain sections are. The data we have right now only goes back to 2013.
A chapeau is not "just like another title basically". It's a lead-in, a phrase which acts as the grammatical start of a sentence which the following subsections finish. For instance, the text in the first paragraph of 18 U.S.C § 3632(a) which ends in an em-dash is a chapeau. Taking pride in work you have not done and not bothered to understand is perplexing.
Spot on. Throwing a coding agent at an XML parser and walking away doesn't make you a 10x developer; it just makes you a publisher of domain-ignorant slop.
This 'zero context' automation is exactly why I’ve pivoted to the PAIO approach for agentic workflows. By enforcing a BYOK architecture and acting as a hardened execution layer, it keeps you firmly in the driver's seat.
We need tools that enhance human accountability and sovereignty, not black boxes that just automate the noise.
> 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?
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.
32 comments
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.
Well it has a data loader, and hits APIs with retry logic, and has a CLI that can take arguments to run data downloads that can resume on fail, and yeah it parses the stupid XML with a “chapeau” tag - did you know that is French for hat? There is a tag that is the “hat” for a section and it is just like another title basically. So yeah, I would’ve had to learn all of that. But it also tests all of these things with actual tests. And the adversary complains if you write a test that isn’t actually testing anything meaningful. And if I needed to, I could reason about the architecture by reading the architecture design documents, which I have done at least a little bit and they are pretty nice, I have to admit.
Anyways - it’s a next step in the evolution of the laws in GitHub which is actually interesting to see them change and imagine what we can do with more data overlayed. Sadly the other repos were not maintained so this is the latest laws and you can view the diff from one Congress to another. Or you can git blame one of the files and see how old certain sections are. The data we have right now only goes back to 2013.
This 'zero context' automation is exactly why I’ve pivoted to the PAIO approach for agentic workflows. By enforcing a BYOK architecture and acting as a hardened execution layer, it keeps you firmly in the driver's seat.
We need tools that enhance human accountability and sovereignty, not black boxes that just automate the noise.
Why even bother?
> 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?
>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.
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.