Four function types
run the business.
Business-as-Code is the operating architecture of every business we deliver: the business itself, written as software. Every business process decomposes into four function types, Code, Generative, Agentic, Human, composed into workflows with goals and key results. Humans hold the gates.
Every process sorts into four rows.
Three of the four run as software; the fourth is the reason the gates exist.
CodeFunctionDeterministic. Same input, same output, every time. Validation, pricing math, settlement, ledgers.
GenerativeFunctionA model produces content or structure: a draft, a summary, a classification. Reviewed, then used.
AgenticFunctionAn agent pursues a goal across steps and tools: qualify, follow up, negotiate, schedule, escalate.
HumanFunctionA person acts where the law or the counterparty requires a person. Authorize. Sign. Pay. Notarize.
Subject, predicate, object.
Every function is a sentence. The subject and object are typed nouns; the predicate is the verb. A workflow is a sequence of sentences, and the gate list is the set of sentences whose subject must be a person.
$.Opportunity.structure.Deal
$.Buyer.sign.Deal
$.Notary.notarize.Title
Humans at authorize, sign, pay, notarize.
The split is decided at qualification, not discovered in production. We census each process into four piles: what can be metered as software, what depends on relationships, what the law reserves for licensed people, and what stays physical. Agents take the first pile. Licensed humans keep the gates.
This is why a delivered business can be separate and still lawful: the statutory acts never left the people entitled to perform them.
Services-as-Software: the work of a service, sold at software economics.
Business-as-Code is how the business is built. What it makes possible on the revenue line is Services-as-Software: the outcome a service firm sells, delivered by software, priced on the work done.
The rows a buyer compares. The third column is only possible when the delivery is code.
Software margins were never about software.
Software earns like software because delivering one more unit costs almost nothing. Services earn like staffing because delivering one more unit costs one more person.
Business-as-Code moves the delivery into code: typed functions do the commercial work, agents staff it, humans hold the statutory gates. Once the delivery is code, the service sells the way software sells and carries software’s cost curve. Infrastructure-as-Code did this for computing; Business-as-Code does it for the work.
Meter the outcome the market already buys.
A Services-as-Software company never sells seats. It sells the unit its market already pays for.
The buyer keeps the budget line they already have and pays it against work done instead of hours. Nothing about the buyer’s organization has to change; that is what makes it sellable to an incumbent’s market on day one.
The first model the architecture enables, not the last.
Business-as-Code is an architecture. Services-as-Software is one business model built on it, the first and the most legible.
A business built on the same architecture can also earn as a transaction business, a marketplace, or a data product; some will combine them. The model is chosen at Thesis, from the job-to-be-done and the unit the market pays for, and it is written into the thesis you sign.
Where architecture and model show up.
Bring a problem, not a pitch.
One question starts the work. We reply in writing either way.