company as code
/ˈkʌmpəni əz kəʊd/noun
Company as code is an approach to recording company knowledge, processes and settings in text files and code. This lets you manage them with version control, checks and automation.
With company as code, we manage our website and ad campaigns from the same repository.
At 10KB, company as code describes our idea of organising more of the work around our business with the same tools we use for software development. Our website, handbooks, technical conventions and ad campaigns live in Glossary · In brief42KB42KB is the central repository of 10KB for code, company knowledge, documentation and internal tools. It is where we put our company as code approach into practice.Read more, our central repository.
We use the word code broadly here. A staff policy can be plain text; a campaign can be a file containing settings and ad copy. Where something needs to happen, we build tools that read and process those files. Our website build turns them into web pages. Our Ads tooling compares campaign files with the settings in Google Ads.
Why record this in text?
We can search, compare and edit text together. Glossary · In briefversion controlVersion control records changes to code, including who changed what and when. It lets developers collaborate, compare changes and return to an earlier version.Read more records who changed what and when. We can inspect a proposal before accepting it and retrieve an earlier version. Where needed, we add automated checks, such as validating campaign settings.
There is another reason this matters to us: an Glossary · In briefLLMLLM stands for large language model: an AI model trained on large amounts of text. It can process language and generate text, including answers, summaries and code.Read more can read and edit the same text. An Glossary · In briefagentAn AI agent is software that uses a language model and tools to carry out a task. It chooses its next steps based on the goal and the results of earlier steps.Read more can use our company knowledge to write a landing page and its accompanying ads, for example. We provide the goal and constraints, and review the changes. Recording the work in readable files lets us hand more of it over to an agent.
Company as code is a name for this approach, rather than a fixed technical standard. Each organisation decides what to record and who can approve changes. A file or an automated check does not replace the judgement of the colleague responsible.