Git for the US Code
lexifina.com
lexifina.com
"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.
At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."
(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )
I do think there are some Markdown-based open source projects that might fit the bill.
Yet there is a demand for version control for nontechnical people. And I know this because I’ve seen enough files called “copy of important thing” or “important thing 2”.
This demonstrates LACK OF demand for technical version control, since the system you describe has been used since forever and found to be good enough.
It doesn’t prove that they don’t want a better solution should it have the right UX. And, as I said in my original comment, the current UX for version control in documents both sucks and is often hidden away where people might not even be aware it exists.
I was trying to avoid naming any products on purpose, but, for example, there is a commercial product that is easy enough for most people and affordable that would work for this- and there are a few open source clones that come close.
The open source clones are not quite polished enough for non-technical users, but they are the closest thing I can think of, basically crossing over a wiki + Markdown for knowledgebase creation with Git-like versioning.
Our problem is that the press isn’t doing their job, not that legislation doesn’t have a commit graph. The latter, even if it existed, would not fix the former.
Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.
Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.
However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.
If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?
Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?
In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.
For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.
I'd actually argue that this is the wrong way around. Being able to git diff legislation is very good, but mainly for humans, who need tools to make work tractable.
An agent will use whatever interface is available, including no interference, won't give up due to the task being too onerous, and can be scaled by paying for more tokens. It could simply brute force diff the raw text, writing bespoke Python and regexes, etc.
LLMs make brute forcing intellect possible. It's humans who need finely crafted tools.
The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.
Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.
The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.
Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction
> But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....
I highly recommend the first three chapters to anybody who thinks they don't need to understand their local politics.
The rough truth is you don’t need the general public to. Just the elites, broadly defined.
I'm personally not interested in being dependent on the press -- which is just other people pursuing their own interests and assumptions -- to interpret artificially opaque sources, if those sources can just be made accessible instead.
Having a dynamic and pluralistic press is a good thing, and we need more investigative journalism, to discover what isn't visible to the public, but I'm not sure there's a lot of value in the sort of interpretive journalism you're proposing.
Insert language you know will never get enough votes
Don’t strike out but add language to make it useless
Plus the bill sponsor often makes changes others ask for, so the true author isn’t noted
It would be a mess and ignored by the public after a while
What I'm getting at is that, if we need to make process changes anyway in order to actually make the technology work for us, then the real solution is in the process and not in the technology.
This is often especially cynical because [popular thing x] is often something that neither party wants to pass. So a very recent example of this was an act against insider trading by politicians, that was bundled with a voter id law. Neither side wants to clamp down on insider trading from politicians, so the entire act was DOA. It was nothing but bread and circuses.
You’d just got a system of favors for who inserts what language. You’d hand tough edits to your safe-seat colleagues and insert messaging amendments designed to get voted down for own comms.
When a measure becomes a target yada yada.
(Note: this proposal is for the U.S. code. Not bills. Git for the USC works.)
Git is a tool, or more accurately in this case, an interface. The measure is the attribution of edits.
I'm still not clear how that defines a specific metric.
The House Office of the Legislative Counsel is non-partisan, impartial, and confidential. Whether transparency has merit or not, tracking provenance would make the office partisan. Is more partisanship in government not a concern?
The second issue with transparency is that communication between legislators and legislative counsel member is subject to the attorney-client relationship. Breaking attorney-client privilege is a serious decision. Knowing how such a change would affect the organization and its members is not something to be taken lightly.
A more convincing argument for transparency would address impartiality and confidentiality. This is pretty clearly a Chesterton's fence type situation where advocating to change a system should anticipate criticisms. Addressing opposition preemptively is an implicit demonstration of knowing why the system exists which is table stakes for changing it.
We could also let people vote directly on their own laws without intermediaries.
Tracking who added what language is in no way partisan.
It's like the people that complain their favoured politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that politician just commits lots of crimes.
2. It will create an incentive structure that will reflect the goals of political parties.
Transparency brings the office into the political sphere. Nothing in the political sphere escapes partisanship. It's pretty clear that no one knew this office existed before I brought it up and folks thought that lawmakers drafted their own bills. The fact that we're even now talking about it in terms of politics is evidence that it will devolve into partisan politics.
I get your instinct - transparency is in general a net good. But the more public an office is, the more it is drawn into partisanship.
Politics is especially prone to engineers disease and this is a great example of it. It assumes a technical solution in the spirit of transparency applies to complex human, social, and political domains where those frameworks do not neatly fit. When someone points out engineers disease, have some introspection before questioning their motives.
When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a request from an elected member or that member's staff, right? What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether provenance is found via the commit author or via some other change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.
Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?
Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in how things are done: information that wasn't available, except through unofficial channels, would now be available (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that information is currently obtainable but is just not easy to obtain, then this would be more of an incremental improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the number or height of the hoops.
I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes reality, but maybe you do?
By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a glasperlenspiel, i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do middle-classes.
More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid that won't happen anytime soon.
I couldn't care less about crypto currencies, but crypto contracts had the potential to replace much (although not all) of the bureaucracy around governments and justice systems. I am very sad it didn't take off.
It's a matter of time.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.
People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying structural incentives that tend toward special interests dominating complex issues.
If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in those motivations will all continue to exist; political influence will just be exercised through other means, and some particular faction or class of people will still be at the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the greatest motivation to apply those means.
A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this is inherent to politics itself, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the reach of political power.
It certainly would be naive to think that simply “getting money out of politics” would “fix” things but it is still a desirable goal for anyone who, themselves, does not currently have extremely large quantities of money.
For example, we could behead people convicted of corrupting or being corrupted. That would be a significant deterrent.
It's also untrue to suggest that any intervention will necessarily create a worse outcome than the status quo.
This has historically done nothing for corruption and everything for one-party rule.
We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.
They didn’t, and they own the consequences.
We have been very lucky in the U.S. to avoid these problems. And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.
Are you somehow under the impression that is the actual complaint about illegal behavior and weaponization of the government? You won't be able to contribute meaningfully to this discussion if you insist on pretending that the hush money payment is the limit of the criminality being discussed here.
Please go do some research into the recent actions of the DoJ before trying to defend them like this, irrelevant whataboutisms will not move this conversation forward.
The bar should be high. We’ve set it impossibly high. In terms of instability risk, corruption is currently causing runaway prosecutions.
The safeguards within the justice system are appropriate for prosecuting individuals. They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
If you don't believe that, then consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose. Except only Texas courts and prosecutors have jurisdiction.
Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
> consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose
Literally the current DoJ and FBI.
Courts are designed to make decisions about individual cases, not ones that affect the trajectory of the whole country. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.
> Literally the current DoJ and FBI
Not even close. I don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool. AOC’s district is MAGA by comparison at 33% Trump voters.
[1] Every DOJ person I know is a great lawyer, phenomenal at their job, and the most upstanding, orderly, conscientious type of American. But they can’t be trusted with that much power over politics. It’s like how you can’t give the One Ring to Gandalf. You have to give it to the Hobbits.
Re your analogy: the power is with Hobbits. We call them grand and petit juries.
You’re getting closer with juries. But the DC jury pool is extremely skewed. Its like Aragorn trying to get a fair trial in Mordor District Court.
Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.
The solution is something more flexible than we have now, but still with a high bar. The check is the courts. America didn’t fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.
> People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively
We don’t need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the powers you’re concerned about.)
Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.
Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession. That’s a solution worse than the problem.
> If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.
You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.
Then it sounds like you need to amend the Constitution. Because that's how our system works. You are indicted by a grand jury in the jurisdiction in which you are accused of a crime and then you are put in front of a petit jury. Both sides agree on who the jury is.
I'm struggling to understand the alternative system you're imagining.
“Make corruption cases easier to bring” is “institutional capture of elections”? What?
> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction
If your only issue is with the jury pool, don’t give DC special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be tried there.
It also seems like you’ve forgotten about appeals.
> to make such consequential decisions for the whole country
We have an election system that’s corrupted by social media, money and the electoral college. That means smaller groups of unaccountable people already make consequential decisions for the whole country.
The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed they were saving their republic. A lot more people, today, believe we’re at a precipice of losing it due to corruption.
So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing corrupt fuckwits endangers us all—the folks pushing for decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the precedent for this anyway.
I'll just leave this here, since this was the actual complaint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.
> As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.
I'm sure many of the rank-and-file at the DOJ DO donate to democrats these days, after all the republican party has demonstrated rank criminality across the last ~ 15 years, which is only getting worse. Anyone at the DOJ who still cares about criminal justice and the rule of law is going to likely support the only remaining party that isn't bending the knee to criminals and con men.
It still doesn't change my original criticism - that the DOJ is run by Trump's personal lawyer - and it doesn't make your whataboutism suddenly relevant.
It’s all we’ve got. Hand waving away corruption when we’ve got destabilizing quantities of it today is unsustainable.
> don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool
Which is the judiciary (broadly) protecting us from rogue prosecutors.
> They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
Right, they're set up to ascertain guilt of a crime. Why is it or should it be their concern if people want to vote for that person or if that person has political aspirations?
You're advocating for criminal law to simply not apply to some people. That is fucking insane.
These are two completely distinct systems. By design.
I remember that you are a foreigner (from some corrupt third world county if I recall?) with a limited understanding of American legal history and political culture, but the idea that voters simply get to decide who is a criminal or not is flatly contrary to America's culture.
This is my only significant disagreement with you. This should be two justices:
1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term
2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice.
I like No. 1.
No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.
To put it another way, I still put a lock on my door even though lockpicks exist. I still use passwords on my accounts even though people could guess or brute force them.
Don't trivialize things to uselessness
It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors", the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more important than the actual votes, etc.
If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so. If they're not paying attention, it means they're not sufficiently motivated, and are choosing not to pay attention, not being constrained artificially.
This seems to be converging to some sort of "false consciousness" argument, where someone speculatively projects motivations and intentions onto other parties, then criticizes those other parties for not acting in accordance with the motivations strangers have projected onto them.
Needless to say, these sorts of arguments are utterly disingenuous, and in this case, somewhat ironic, because the people arguing that outcomes should conform to their speculative ideologies -- even in defiance of what the public themselves are manifestly choosing -- are themselves special interests trying to exert their own influence over politics.
Yes, exactly, people who profit directly from certain decisions can afford to spend a lot more time and resources on this than ordinary voters.
There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
It is not. You’re not reading carefully enough.
Donations are always bribes.
> Donations to a politician are to the person.
Isn't that how bribery is normally done?
> It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
Perhaps not precisely, but it is a proxy for attempting to influence an outcome.
> under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Isn't that in conflict with:
> it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician.
Are you saying that if I give a politician money and express my desire that they are then legally bound to vote according to my desire? Sounds like buying votes; I'm pretty sure that's not condoned by the law.
But voting today is such a performative act for them. There are great pieces of legislation that can't pass because someone has labeled it as radical so one side or the other can't be seen with their name on it so they don't pass it even though they know it is good and would benefit their constituents.
- The donor class is really in charge, and completely unaccountable
- Public servants are our representatives in a fight against them
- Protecting them from exploitation by the donors is in our interest
Git commits get rebased, squashed, cherry-picked and edited retroactively, written during pair or mob programming sessions or rewritten during code review. And we also know that commit messages often suck. As a result, commits almost never tell you the full story about who exactly contributed, in what order or why.
The process is even messier when writing new bills. They get passed around between different departments, discussed & edited in various committees, etc.
Sure, you could force all participating parties to use git, prevent them from force-pushing or rewriting history even on their "feature branches", get them to sign their every commit, etc. But what you'd then likely just end up with is most negotiation & editing happening out-of-band.
Besides: At the end of the day it's the (majority of the) parliament that enacts a given law, so in my book they are all responsible, even if in practice laws get written by a small subset of people.
https://juriblio.fr/pourquoi-juriblio
It shows git-like diffs plus an AI summary of what changed. There is no author attribution though - I'm not sure there is a business use case for it, lawyers don't care about who wrote a specific law.
I always assumed they negotiated and then some group who made the deals wrote it all up.
It's a simple idea; it's cheap; there are no outstanding technical questions; it benefits almost everyone. Let's get this done.
I don't want to privatize this core civic function to some NGO.
I took lazy to mean "waiting for the gov rather than doing it ourselves". I'm saying that may be true for the initial catch-up but it's not true for the work going forward.
I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
> I want to see a practical benefit to maintaining this with public funds versus the usual redlines.
The US government works for the people and, as such, changes made to the US Code over time must be traceable, discoverable, and therefore justifiable by or condemnable to those who are responsible for said changes without fear or favor.
That is as practical as it gets.
They are. The history of the USC is public. This is one way of visualizing it. It’s good. But I want to see the advantage of this presentation.
*from the US. Please remember that the Hacker News community is not limited to this single country.
The data is "there" in some some sense, but it is messy, coarse-grained, and arrives slowly.
Once the office is familiar with Git, we can start the conversation about having the new version of the US code instantly ready when a bill is passed. In particular, rather than voting on the informal patch, congress should vote on the final result. (bills are patches, but votes should be on the new state with the patch applied.) Then the office merely supervises the Git repo, and is freed up to focus on other codification tasks, such as hyperlinking definitions, overseeing formalization of the tax code like France did, etc.
Previous discussions often foolishly conflate version control with "no force pushing of any branch" and "all branches must be public". That is stupid. Vote trading will continue to make drafting happen in secret, since it is simple game theory that an "atomic transaction" of many possibly-unrelated things is an efficacious coordination mechanism. This is just about getting the final version and its already-public history cleaned up and mechanized to the greatest degree possible.
French bills evolution versioned in git and visualized The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz https://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/
"Law is Code" on The Law Factory: french bills as git, opendata and dataviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817357 May 2014 (0 comments)
Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("§1. In the law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with "this and that". §2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. §3. After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says "etc. and so on".)
After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are combined together and a unified version of the law is published. These documents aren't technically the law, they just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.
ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were passed, plus crosslinks between laws that change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus current and archival unified versions, plus related administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.
Example page for the traffic code https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19970...
First PDF is the original, second PDF is the unified version, then there's links - 4 others changed, 4 explicitly obsoleted, 12 implicitly obsolete, 707 administrative orders, 12 Constitutional Tribunal rulings, 11 previous + current unified versions, 212 patches, 14 relevant EU directives.
Those years tell me 2 things:
1) Yes, absolutely version control for legislation is critical.
2) That doesn't mean Git is the right answer.
Since I don't work at the federal level, I don't know what system they use, but I do know that their workflow is already based on specific changes - they will write up the changes to a document, then apply the changes and publish a new document. Those documents are posted on congress.gov. So they do have a versioning workflow and public accessibility, just not the same style as software devs are used to. I'm sure it could be improved, but I'm not sure forcing them into our working style is the right answer.
The real goal here is not "Use Git". That is an implementation detail, and one that has also been presented and discussed quite a bit in my niche of the industry. Mostly, it is unwanted. Or was unwanted the last time the discussion went around. Git makes sense to software engineers, but not to the general public, and not to any of the document authors I've worked with. Maybe we can add a UX layer to fix that, but that isn't the bigger point...
What we want is to work towards the actual goals: For the tracking to be more detailed, with more transparency including not only authorship of the change, but the source of the change. And presumably, some commentary as to why the change was made. Then all of that should be available to the public.
If git works as a data structure that supports a solution that meets those goals, fine. I'm not anti-git. But when designing solutions, we need to start from the goals of the system, not the data layer. And we need to design solutions that the document authors will actually use, not force them to work like us.
It might be interesting to have a git mirror as a means of searching bills and changes but not as the source of truth.
In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation. I think AI may make this easier, but the challenge is in not spamming the "free and open" access to the online record of our legislation.
So far, it's probably a one-person $50K per year job to do this task manually, and the language of the public legislation record didn't lend itself easily to determining the laws or rights that actually changed when bills were passed into legislation. They are explicitly stated, but hard to distill with regexes, filters or other analysis tools (e.g. "Who voted to stop electric scooters going over 25km/h?") If you try reading the legislation, you will know what I mean.
"A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level
The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard and (linked from that page) https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_docume... would likely be good places to start
> How does your MP vote on the issues that matter to you?
previously covered on hn:
The idea is cool though.
As an aside, my city FB group(small town, basically the local forum and news) has been absolutely flooded with AI 'flyers', and I have the same reaction. I can't put my finger on the exact reason, maybe the busy-ness, but they're repelling to my eyes.
Luckily after about 6 months of this now they're starting to get heavy pushback.
I hope the LLM builders are paying attention and they add some kind of step in the process that causes the system to reflect on its assumptions about context and work to refine its understanding of the context before generating output.
Now major version coming within 1 month probably with many architectural changes. The thesis is that it's basically all doable as a compiler but there may be certain cases which are irreducibly ambiguous and need human/AI to adjudicate them. The rest must be deterministic.
Two suggestions: 1) Handwrite the website (mainly the copy but also the design) instead of letting Claude do that. Right now it is really hard to read and comprehend. 2) Drop the "frontend" terminology. Even if it makes sense from a technical perspective, people working in the legal field (who I suppose you want to reach) will likely find it confusing.
I think I'll call it "frontend" still internally but I'll look for better terminology.
Agreed re the website. Initially had a simpler website and well, I guess I was trying to achieve something re getting actual jurisdictions interested on adopting it and gauging how much energy to spend on this in general.
Hopefully one day soon my other projects are a lesser priority so I "get to" do the websites again, and maybe figure out what I'm even trying to communicate, exactly or achieve with the website. Hopefully global adoption eventually.
In Switzerland, at least at the federal level, and since 2020, laws are created in HTML too. You can compare between versions as well as languages.
Swiss Constitution, under "Tools" click on "Version comparison" - https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en
I tired to do something similar, it's somewhat okay (In german)
https://shadowofthepit.github.io/Projekt-Gesetzvergleich/Bun...
A surprising amount of tracking and diffing in legal texts is actually very different to git. It's a trap to assume software version control fits the needs for legal work.
Blew my mind when I realized I could do that.
I thought legal document versioning software would cover some of these problems but it doesn't seem like a similar enough process.
I'm not saying lawyers aren't really really expensive, but you don't have to spend a long time digging into just a simple question like "what parts of the law are no longer enforceable after a supreme court decision" before you start to understand why they charge the prices they do.
Version control for the public parts will make both public and secretive law-drafting better.
If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it. They will certainly have a reason. Tell them if you disagree, and vote when you can.
Only if those bold reforms weren't in the interests of the people they serve. Risky bipartisan compromises should still be transparent along with what was gained in exchange for them. If the people feel that the compromise wasn't worth it they should be empowered to vote accordingly come election time. It's the job of representatives to assure the people who elected them that they are doing a good job and if they can't do that they deserve to lose their position. Refusing to support bold reforms that the people they represent want, or refusing to compromise when it would be beneficial to voters would become just as costly to their career.
> It takes significant work to produce successful legislation, and much of that work can be productively and safely done without direct public oversight.
Often most of that work is done entirely for them by corporations and lobbying groups and "law makers" just vote how they are paid to vote without even reading the bill put before them. Just because something can be done in secrecy doesn't make that the ideal way to do it. We've have extremely poor results with the system as it stands right now, so a change to introduce more transparency and accountability seems like a very good idea.
> This is the same reason an individual might value a private journal.
A public servant representing the people by making edits to laws and performing the duties they were elected to carry out is nothing at all like someone keeping a private journal. Their work is not their personal affairs, it is the public's affairs. How that work is being done matters to the public. Legislators would still remain free to go home at the end of the day and write in their private diary all they like.
> If you have a problem with your representative’s behavior, call their office and ask about it.
When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them accountable for it, which is exactly why it takes place in secrecy. Increasing the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable by increasing transparency can only improve outcomes for voters, and it would certainty be inconvenient for elected officials who want to put their own interests above the interests of the people who elected them.
This is my point exactly: the creative process is impossible to do perfectly. If you want to find potential policies to enact, you need to examine very many policies that don’t work and aren’t in your constituents best interest. Those get left on the table and not advanced to actual congressional actions, sparing the legislator scrutiny for their creativity.
Some creative solution-seeking will happen in a bipartisan way through negotiation. I understand the desire to see the whole process, but removing the veil would change the behavior the participants. If every word were subject to partisan scrutiny from the wings, how could congresspeople possibly get anything productive done? See as evidence congressional committee hearings, in which the members spend significant time grandstanding for C-SPAN sound bites instead of productive questioning.
> When their behavior is conducted in secrecy behind closed doors the public doesn't have the ability to hold them accountable for it
This is obviously not true. Every bill has publicly documented sponsors and goes through a lengthy, public process with several rounds of procedural votes, committee approvals, amendment debates, etc. At some point there must be a minimum granularity of attribution. Track Changes from blank page to finished law would be useless anyway, because it would show some unpaid staffer actually typed most of the changes. Even Git history uses commits, and very mature projects like the Linux kernel revise their patches rather than keeping a detailed history of the patch creation. The champion who landed it and their reviewers are credited with the patch, as also in Congress.
> Often most of that work is done entirely for them by corporations and lobbying groups
The drafting and ideation? Sure! I wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s much better that we have an entire industry of people studying the law, finding solutions, and advocating their preferred options, rather than a group of Philosopher Kings making the law in isolation. You’re also dramatically downplaying the effort of coalition building, balancing constituent pressure, and passing procedural hurdles that is required to take a bill all the way from draft to law.
I think we may agree that provenance of bill text originating from outside of Congress could potentially be more transparent. But then again, the relevant interest groups are usually very well known by the time a bill reaches the floor anyway because that is their whole purpose, and they want to take credit for their victories. And “Monsanto drafted these provisions” is pretty far from the vision of absolute transparency and zero congressional privacy that you seem to be suggesting.
Do you have other specific ideas to increase transparency? If bill sponsor attribution, public debate and amendment, and recorded voting record are insufficient to understand a legislator’s actions, what would you suggest instead?
The complexity is in common law, not natural-language laws.
The U.S. Code and Code of Federal Regulations can be completely presented through a Git-like system. The complexity comes in when attaching court cases.
If you've got a statute like "no vehicles in the park," the fundamental issue is that you have to interpret "what is meant by 'vehicle'?" and no legal drafting is going to be good enough to actually cover all the possible cases well enough. The main difference between a common law and a civil law system here is that in a common law system, you have to cite the previous similar cases (because precedent is binding) whereas in a civil law system, you're merely using those previous similar cases as persuasive evidence. At the end of the day, it boils down to arguing for your interpretation.
And in my experience working on language standardization (which is closer to a civil law system than a common law system), it's fairly often that I have to resort to looking up not just when a change in the text occurred, but dive deep into the discussions of the paper proposing the change to understand what the committee thought it was doing with the change. The complexity of law is fairly similar--the changes to the law themselves often require understanding the legislative and interpretative history of the law to understand what the intent of the drafter was to be able to rule on how the law is extended to an unanticipated scenario.
If you want to know the literal text (that may or may not be enforceable), then sure a plain text diff is sufficient to know that nothing at all has changed about federal communication laws since this section was last amended in 2002. But if you want to know what the actual law is, you definitely need more than just a text diff.
Maybe. Maybe it’s a court finding the legislature never had the power to pass that rule. Maybe it’s what constitutes a park.
Visualizing changes in statute with git is fine. It would have real difficulty in presenting changes in law, as a whole, as well as an annotated supplement. (At the end of the day, redlines, git trees and annotated supplements are just visualization methods. The actual federal law lives in the USC, CFR and opinions of our courts.)
In the interpretation of the law, yes, but that doesn't matter for version controlling the text of the law, and in that sense, you can absolutely manage the text pretty cleanly in git. Most laws are just text. Many bills are literal git-diffs, except in prose, which can make it hard to understand a bill.
> exception handling (hardcode-style responses)
This is basically non-sequitur (there no such thing as a "hardcode-style response" in git…), and again, I think you're misunderstanding the idea here.
That seems like a great way to turn functional legislation into swiss cheese as one line at a time things are either kept or removed based on chance/circumstance and the whims of the current people in power.
Laws are collectively voted for as a complete package, and a law that worked and was passed as being acceptable can become useless, dangerous, and undesirable with a very small number of lines removed from them. I want lawmakers to spend their time focused on the entirety of a bill. Your idea would result in them fighting over who should or shouldn't be recorded as the official author of each and every line. We don't need nonsense like "Senator X will retire soon so Senator Y should author it!", or "I'll agree to author line 405 if you agree to author line 30!"
Your idea, like so many ideas where laws just fade away unless something happens to keep them, also sounds like a great way for you to lose longstanding freedoms and protections that should never be at risk of simply deprecating just because some one gets voted out or dies or retires.
The intent of a law should be clear from the text. It isn't always, but at least now it's possible. To have the intent of a law, or even worse the intent of specific lines within a law, subject to change at any time would make interrupting that law and establishing precedent a nightmare for the courts.
We really should have a system in place to help clear out old and unnecessary laws on the books, but this would be a terrible way to accomplish that.
For the record, and feel free to steal it if you like it, I called it “G(overnm)it-blame”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625366 - United States Code (federal laws) in Git (2026-04-03, 15 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621591 - Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub (2026-04-02, 32 comments)
I think it's parsing this data:
https://uscode.house.gov/download.html
Which was discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6135504 - The entire US Code is now online in XML (2013-07-31, 237 comments)
Someone set it up for Philly and Baltimore too, but I can't seem to find it.
Also, because how the judicial branch decides case law needs to be reviewable by the People, so that we can inform the various legislatures to adjust the law if the judicial system is not ruling to the will of the People.
Thing which are public law should be publicly accessible.
There's an online portal for NEC code book, but they made it awful, no search, no hyper links, the bare minimum.
I used codex in computer mode to collect the relevant pages to my project. (Electricity to shed).
Does it already exist?
The tl;dr is that doing git-style change-tracking of the legislation isn't as helpful in practice as you'd think (especially because a lot of the very basic change-tracking is already available in the existing tools that lawyers use!).
Hope you get a good govt contract if that's an aim.
It's all messy human stuff that I don't think "diff" handles all that well.
These code run on meat. Meat is not silicon, and it executes same code very differently. President can be king, etc.
it was built by academics deeply familiar with the security and usability of git and secure tools.
Why would one need a trustless distributed system to store document deltas published by an inherently trusted entity (federal government)?
Agentically this could be done now, but it would still just be the tip of the iceberg
You're looking at quantum states of law and regulations, and that's just for one jurisdiction
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore.
It is also unmaintained since many years.
But is using infrastructure from an American company to store German laws really a good approach?
us-code/uscode/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-procedure /chapter-033-emblems-insignia-and-names.md : https://github.com/nickvido/us-code/blob/c8080f872443ce8ff54...
If transparency is the goal, the entire codebase for this should be public domain and not profitable. Otherwise there's a profit motive to rewrite history.
This makes sense for bills. It doesn't for laws. Once a bill is a law, it's the will of the Congress.
The legislative process is inherently collaborative in a way that's ordinarily undocumented. Who introduced an amendment and who supported it are entirely separate. Someone who introduced language can wind up not supporting it because of where the mix of trade-offs winds up.
At the level of a bill, knowing who wrote language matters. At the level of law, you should only care who voted for it. (I'm not even tackling the inherent subjectivity in tracing e.g. language in the CFR to specific language in a bill.)
even then you have three-line whips and numerous reasons to vote for / against things that are wrapped up in party politics and other stupid games
once something is passed; the intent of the writer, the intent of those that voted for it and the meaning of the words in the final legislation can all be wildly different.
So to make this a git repo, I guess you'd make the snapshots be the law plus markup for all the changes, and the diffs are the metachanges. For each snapshot S, you could generate a git repo whose snapshots are the law and the whose diffs are the changes in the law (as described by S). However, this probably isn't the best way to query S.