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skissaneyesterday at 11:34 PM1 replyview on HN

Thought about automated discovery of laws in an existing codebase?

If you can find a law which the existing code obeys, and show it to a human, and if they agree, save it. And maybe the AI could make a decent guess as to what kind of laws would appeal to a human versus which wouldn't – a simple law identifying a fundamental constraint the system obeys is good, something really complicated or constraining something coincidentally true isn't

Or some kind of measure of coverage? you'd never want 100% – then your laws would become so complex you couldn't follow or maintain them – but if it is very low, that can be a signal to increase it


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drfloyd51today at 1:33 AM

Discover the laws in a current code base?

They are usually in the “tests” folder.

So anything capable of extracting unit tests is extracting “laws”.

One might consider the test name the text of a law. And the AI fills in the details.

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