Regenerative Software

Chapter 4. The Regeneration Pipeline

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You already trust a machine to write most of your code, and you have for decades. You write in a high-level language, and a compiler turns it into machine instructions you will never read, never review, and never hand-edit. When a bug appears, you fix the source and recompile. Nobody patches the binary. We have forgotten how radical this arrangement is, because it works so well that it disappeared into the background: we let an automated pipeline produce the artifact that actually runs, and we trust that artifact. Not because we inspect it, but because we trust the process that produced it and the checks that constrain it.

That arrangement is the ancestor of everything in this chapter. The regeneration pipeline asks a question the field has answered before, in a new key: what if the high-level language is a behavioral specification, and the compiled artifact is the whole application, database and API and validation and interface? And it answers the way compilers, build systems, and immutable infrastructure all answered ...