I love this idea and pondered it myself.

I feel like the way many open source projects are maintained could be implemented by our government. Having laws be a series of RFCs and pull requests to a big open source project like the Linux kernel.

Imagine the IRS being replaced by an open source repo that computes the taxes for a citizen. Politicians would lead RFCs - showing the change to the code, who it impacts, duration, etc.

Then anyone could clone out the repo to compute their taxes. Or people could fork it and design additional front ends, analysis software for research, etc.

Or your example of legal systems with laws - it’s such a mess. By having it maintained with some type of code you could have linter’s and automated checks that make sure laws don’t conflict, or show warnings of loopholes. Like how Rust checks your code to make sure it’s safe and there are no unhandled exceptions.

Maybe with AI this will happen with our current system…but that just feels like a band-aid approach. Like, “let’s use AI to read and write these laws because even we don’t even understand them!” haha.