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← Rust in Peace

From Law to Workflow

Chapter 5 of 7 · Section 36 of 59

Sections

1. Intro

  • 1. May my soul rust in peace
  • 2. 5 Years at the Fruit
  • 3. 4 years finance data & platform engineering
  • 4. 1 year teaching programming
  • 5. What I realized is
  • 6. Decided to be a lawyer in New York
  • 7. What our firm does
  • 8. NeonLawNavigator
  • 9. Agenda
  • 10. Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program

2. The Rails Lesson

  • 11. Convention over configuration
  • 12. The database was a shared design
  • 13. Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
  • 14. Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
  • 15. Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
  • 16. "It works on my machine"
  • 17. How new all of this still was
  • 18. From Rails conventions to Navigator
  • 19. A eulogy for my programming career

3. Shared craft compounds

  • 20. Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
  • 21. Widely available — governed in the open
  • 22. A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
  • 23. Say it with your whole chest

4. Six ways to know a change holds

  • 24. One giant change deserves more than one glance
  • 25. The compiler asks whether the program can be true
  • 26. Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
  • 27. Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
  • 28. Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
  • 29. Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
  • 30. Three workshops, three people, one method
  • 31. Fast generation, slow enough verification

5. From Law to Workflow

  • 32. The goal — deterministic workflows from law
  • 33. Step 1 — read the law
  • 34. Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
  • 35. "It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
  • 36. Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
  • 37. Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
  • 38. Step 5 — signature is a modular step
  • 39. Step 6 — the filing, run durably
  • 40. "It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
  • 41. Why a workflow beats a prompt
  • 42. Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product

6. Rust All the Way Down

  • 43. We did not start all Rust
  • 44. From Postgres to Rust — over a bridge, since dismantled
  • 45. The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
  • 46. One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
  • 47. Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
  • 48. Rust reaches the places lawyers work
  • 49. I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
  • 50. Always the latest, always Rust
  • 51. Swap the seam — it still works
  • 52. The crates we actually run on
  • 53. Ethics is part of the stack
  • 54. The simplest developer environment I can get away with
  • 55. The online developer environment
  • 56. "It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
  • 57. Where we are today — live by August 20
  • 58. Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace

7. Wrap Up

  • 59. Take the method home

Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow

The template is one markdown file with two machine-readable graphs: a questionnaire graph (what we ask) and a workflow graph (what we do). The Nest questionnaire is six answers, in order.

From templates/forms/united_states/nevada/state/nv__llc_formation.md:


questionnaire:
  BEGIN:
    _: person__client
  person__client:
    _: entity__company
  entity__company:
    _: person__registered_agent
  person__registered_agent:
    _: custom_single_choice__management_structure
  custom_single_choice__management_structure:
    _: people__managing_members
  people__managing_members:
    _: custom_datetime__formation_date
  custom_datetime__formation_date:
    _: END
  END: {}

And here is the workflow — the LLC formation dissected into small, named, modular steps. Each state is a noun in our glossary; each transition is a signal some handler fires. This graph is the product.

From templates/forms/united_states/nevada/state/nv__llc_formation.md:


workflow:
  BEGIN:
    intake_submitted: intake_persisted__organizer
  intake_persisted__organizer:
    articles_rendered: lawyer_review
  lawyer_review:
    approved: generate_pdf__articles_pdf
    rejected: END
  generate_pdf__articles_pdf:
    pdf_persisted: sent_for_signature__pending
  sent_for_signature__pending:
    signature_received: filing__nv_sos
    signature_declined: END
  filing__nv_sos:
    filed: END
  END: {}

Presenter notes

Read the workflow aloud and it is the practice of law: intake, render, attorney review, signature, filing. Swap the filing state and the same shape closes an estate plan or sends a consumer-report dispute letter — the steps are modular because the states are vocabulary, not prose. No branching is needed for a simple formation.

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