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.
Seriously the intent is to build more on top of this, and viewing the git diffs of laws changing is already interesting. Once we get the additional data to create other overlays it will be a lot more interesting and something you really can’t see elsewhere
Thank you - noted for my future sharing, and appreciate your additional ideas.
The second half of the data that powers the cooler features is rate-limited so it is going to take a few weeks to download - but ultimately being able to see who voted on something, see laws that were proposed and debated and rejected… lots of cool ideas (beyond “can I create some real software that does this with just some basic specs”)
The real point for me is the dark factory we built that built the repo that generated the full git history of laws. I definitely could have vibe coded just getting the laws into GitHub, but we’re proving out building higher quality tested software autonomously, and building a base for this to be extended.
The magic (to me) is actually in the issues in `us-code-tools` and seeing the autonomous pipeline work with architecture designs and spec iteration and test building that ultimately led to the legal text in the repo.
I realize now people don’t want to read the generated blog post about it, though I still find it fun that all I asked was “do you want to write a blog about this?”
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.