You are wrong to say there's no way to test anything. Imagine an enormous AI generating test cases for you constantly, in an adversarial fashion, with built-in

You are wrong to say there's no way to test anything. Imagine an enormous AI generating test cases for you constantly, in an adversarial fashion, with built-in rewards for advancing a more correct understanding of the text. Lawyers call this "testing", rightly so. If you are interested in efficiency / cost-effectiveness, it's got lots to be desired. But if you are interested in the internal integrity of the document etc, then this is better than almost anything developers have. I hate these words as I type them but the law is also "agile" (ugh). It gets modified as it's used. It does not need high-assurance machine-verified "referential integrity". In my entire course of studying the law I don't think I've seen a single legal dispute over a problem of referential integrity. Mistakes, especially drafting mistakes, are corrected on the fly pretty much everywhere they appear, and then they disappear. For a dev, using the wrong variable name in a bad language could mean you introduce a huge security vulnerability and massive loss of trust. (Or if you write smart contracts, $100M down the drain.) For lawyers, referring to the wrong section has essentially zero consequences. Nobody cares. Maybe you get a funny look from a senior. Finally re the 10k LOC tangent that this is supposed to be connected to, I'm not really sure what you're complaining about. You get "10kLOC" cases, but you also get well-organised practice guides & bench books. Laws in statute are typically very well organised, in my experience about 5-10x better than the average codebase. Laws are organising large swaths of the sum total of human endeavour, just as code does. I would say developers are behind overall, which makes sense for a discipline that's less than a century old.