alt Hacker NewsDiscover 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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skissane • today at 2:07 AM
I don’t think that’s right.
Unit tests check whether a specific code module is implemented correctly given its (implicit) specification.
Good “laws” are independent of the structure of the code.
Tests may be a useful source for inferring what the laws are, but much of the actual content of the tests aren’t “laws” at all.
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From the codebases I have seen the "laws" are scattered between unit tests and lots of little tests and assertions in the actual code, plus cultural norms and "do it like this" patterns.
But a good start could be found in the unit tests.