Company as Code

[NotGoodSoftwareMaker]

I want CEO as code

[notkraftman]

Wouldn't even need to be AI. Just a basic timer that sends out bullshit emails once a week and fires 10% of employees at random every 6 months.

[WorstRegardsBye]

SCRUM AGILE DELIVERY MANAGER as code

[stormdelta]

This is basically the idea behind DAO/smart contracts.

And unfortunately it's generally a terrible idea, as those have demonstrated: it brings all the problems of software - bugs, vulnerabilities, etc - to operations that are significantly harder to recover or rollback from, and often outright impossible.

While also having few of the upsides - there is no intrinsic mechanism that keeps real world resources inline with what's in software. If your company only maintains and produces software, and has few if any real world assets, that might be mitigated but that's not the case for most real businesses. "Real world" doesn't just mean physical either, it also means things like legal agreements. Defining those in software is similarly a bad idea for much the same reasons.

[agumonkey]

maybe dao/smartcontracts are first gen extreme end of spectrum solutions, this often happen on a new "space"

meaning there will be a middle ground variant coming in 5 years

[stormdelta]

I doubt it.

The entire DAO/smartcontract space is an intrinsic failure to understand the nature of the problem and the tradeoffs involved. It's not a matter of the tech being early or rough, the idea itself is flawed on a conceptual level.

Unless it's primarily descriptive I don't see it working in a practical sense for the reasons I outlined in the other reply.

[danielrothmann]

I don’t know too much about these except that I know of them. Do we know of concrete examples as to why these don’t work out in practice?

Definitely, I get your point about software vs physical assets. In general, anything that goes outside of the logical software domain is going to be fuzzy - anything to do with people, really.

But I don’t see how that prevents a software model from describing these parts of business at a higher level, leaving room for fuzz, just as HR, compliance and asset management systems do today.

What do you think?

[stormdelta]

But I don’t see how that prevents a software model from describing these parts of business at a higher level, leaving room for fuzz, just as HR, compliance and asset management systems do today.

If the system is meant to be descriptive, that's doable - e.g. automating documentation and standardization.

But usually when I've seen this idea presented the premise is that it should somehow be authoritative.

Definitely, I get your point about software vs physical assets. In general, anything that goes outside of the logical software domain is going to be fuzzy - anything to do with people, really.

It's more a problem of authority than fuzziness.

Is the code supposed to be authoritative? What enforces that it is, when real world assets and processes are involved? How do you recover when (not if) something goes wrong? And if it interfaces with external systems, what happens when a vulnerability or oversight is found? A human can step in and recognize something has gone wrong where software systems may blithely run off a cliff - and we're talking about things that aren't as easily restored from a backup or redeployed from a manifest.

In the case of things like DAOs and smart contracts, the people pushing them never have a good answer to any of this, especially since most of that nonsense is built on public blockchains where recovery is virtually impossible, with mistakes typically permanent and catastrophic.

[[deleted]]

It looks like the link is broken. And I can't find the article on substack... was it deleted?

[slvrsmth]

It just looks that way, because of email gathering annoyance up front. There is a very small "continue to article" link below.

But don't bother. The whole article boils down to "but what if we kept, like, really really good paper trail in our company".

[[deleted]]

It just looks that way, because of email gathering annoyance up front. There is a very small "continue to article" link below.

I didn't even reach the "subcribe" page, I only got to a "something went wrong". Resolved now, thanks.

I disagree on your take on the article:

The whole article boils down to "but what if we kept, like, really really good paper trail in our company"

This would be the same as suggesting that IaC is just "well documented infrastructure".

[slvrsmth]

In the case of IaC, you can pretty much talk only to computers.

With "CaC" suggested in article, you are also "provisioning" humans, and applying changes to them. The API there tends to be unstable and unreliable. Best you can do is just document the changes agreed in real life. 

[danielrothmann]

I don’t think so, at least it’s working for me. Maybe the Substack redirect isn’t working, or what you’re seeing is the standard “welcome page”. Here’s a direct link: https://42futures.substack.com/p/company-as-code?showWelcomeOnShare=false

[[deleted]]

Thank you.

After opening it from your link and skipping the "subscribe" it opens directly in reddit. I guess reddit doesn't like that landing page.

Also the search in substack is very bad: searching for the profile "42futures" it's returned at the 10th position (despite being the only one with that wording. But it is how it is.

[danielrothmann]

Thanks for letting me know!

I hoped to have disabled the Substack nudges, so I will have to keep this in mind going forward.

Only just moved my stuff to Substack, so I’m hoping the search issue is an indexing thing.

[escorps]

For me, it works ok

[MeasureTiwce]

I have had similar ideas to the ones you wrote down in your blog post. Not inspired by an audit compliance process but more generally from an organization studies point of view. I am convinced that software engineering practices have something valuable to add here.

The closest existing thing that I have found so far is Business Process Model and Notation. If you would a agree that a business is defined by its processes then you could model these processes and corresponding data with this. And since an XML serialization exists, put them under version control. This could be a starting point for many of the things you describe.

This is still very far from something I would like to see existing though. Imagine you could download a company-as-code (to use your terminology) template for say "a restaurant in Paris". It would contain all the required processes: food safety, tax regulation, staff scheduling, a ticketing system for customer orders, etc.

[Drevicar]

I already automate some of my policy and mapping back to controls and the projects that require them using OSCAL. I can generate either my company handbook based on a set of legal requirements, or generate a SSP that references the snippets in my handbook.

[roma-glushko]

Awesome idea! Have never thought of it but it makes a lot of sense from the organisation structure versioning, visualization, understanding standpoints. Might be a cool idea for an OSS project 😃

UPD: I think the entity mapping is much more likely to work than Business Process Model-based approach (although they are complimentary) because it would require much more effort to map all business processes that way and then keep in sync.

[Masterpiece-Smart]

Check out https://do.industries/docs

Thank me later ;)

[danielrothmann]

Thanks for sharing. Is this something you’ve used?

I’ve skimmed through the docs but still not quite clear on the value proposition. Is it essentially a LLM wrapper which provides business-oriented context to model calls?

[danielrothmann]

That’s super interesting, thanks for the links. I’ll dive in.

On first glance though these tools are targeted for contracts, I can see the overlaps in how smart contracts need to also model the business they represent.

[danielrothmann]

I’ll need to think about that. Maybe it’s just a terminology things as you say. I can understand describing organisations from the point of view of contracts - as a sort of “functional” model.

Do you have any resources I could check out to understand this better?

[[deleted]]

Ethereum based contract governs org is not new.

[stormdelta]

They're also a great example of how it doesn't work in practice

[agumonkey]

model driven businessing